Open Source Teach Pendant Programming Environment

This project aims to develop an open-source teach pendant for use with ROS and Robot Raconteur open-source ecosystems. While the ROS and Robot Raconteur ecosystems provide bleeding edge capabilities, utilizing these capabilities requires a high level of computer programming skill. Due to this high learning curve, open source projects are not widely used in industrial environments. This project will develop a teach pendant designed to work with these ecosystems while providing a high-level programming environment that encapsulates the complexity of the underlying technology and allows relatively low skill operators to successfully program the robot. This high-level programming can be done using either a modified Python dialect or Blockly, a visual programming language. The teach pendant consists of five major components: Restricted Python Dialect, Blockly Visual Programming, Restricted Python Runtime Environment, Touch Screen User Interface, Prototype Teach Pendant.