An effective visual programming tool for learning and using robotics middleware

Abstract

To encourage further use of robotics middleware, thereby, increasing the efficiency of the development process, we propose a Web-based visual programming tool for beginners. We first suggest the following requirements: (1) to utilize robotics middleware; (2) to easily build a development environment; (3) to combine variables and commands to operate various types of robots in a straightforward manner; and (4) to easily reference both objects in visual programming and source code. Consequently, we compare our work with existing visual programming tools for programming education and for robot control. Finally, we confirm the effectiveness of our tool. We detail our programming tool for learning and using Robotics Technology (RT) middleware. In particular, we use HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript to implement a Web-based GUI that automatically generates RT-Component source code. This code is then transferred through the XML-RPC process and launched on the server machine.