Rocksi is the Robot Blocks Simulator. Acronyms are strange :)
Rocksi is a robot simulator that runs entirely in (modern) web browsers with absolutely no installation. It is thus platform independent and won't care if students are working on Android tablets, iPads or laptops. The robot is programmed using the popular [Blockly](https://developers.google.com/blockly/ library, which is also used by Scratch, Niryo, and a bunch of other projects, and a custom execution routine.
A running version can be found on ndahn.github.io/ and the source code is available at github.com/ndahn/Rocksi! Unfortunately, the version at rocksi.net is outdated and I have no control over the URL anymore.
Rocksi is distributed under the very permissive MIT license, which basically states that you can do with it whatever you want! Check out the LICENSE file for further details. However, please be aware that some of the robot models included may use different licenses. The relevant companies have permitted the use in Rocksi.
You will need npm or any other package manager that can handle package.json files to build this project. First install the dependencies by running the following command in the project's root directory:
npm install
Afterwards you can build the project in development or build mode by running
npm run [dev|build]
This will also start a local parcel webserver serving Rocksi. Especially when running in build mode, check the scripts section in package.json as it may contain some settings that influence the build process.
You can find the main entry point in src/index.js. From there, anything related to the 3d-side (e.g. viewport, robot model, inverse kinematics, etc.) can be found in src/simulation/, and the entrypoint for that directory is scene.js.
If you are interested in the robot's programming side, you should have a look at src/editor/blockly.js. The custom commands for the robot can be found in src/editor/blocks/ and the functions for turning them into runnable code in src/editor/generators/.
Finally, if you want to see how the robot executes the commands it receives, you should look at src/simulation/simulator.js.
Feel free to drop me a message if you need further help! :)
Robots are one of the corner stones of future industries and technological development. The recent years' advancements in control, intuivity and sensitivity has made these beautiful yet complex machines much more accessible. Modern robots manage to hide much of their complexity, to the degree that even non-specialists and children can handle them with ease.
Despite these major advancements, to the average person robots stay elusive and incomrpehensible, almost mystical. This is for two reasons:
- they are expensive and hard to come by
- the knowledge and tech that makes them move is non-trivial and inaccessible
To this end many schools throughout the world have started adding robotics to their curricula. However, their expensive nature gave rise to a new problem: at classes of 20-40 students, how can every student work with the robot if the school can't afford to spend hundreds of thousands of euros? This is where Rocksi comes in!
If you speak German and want to learn more about robotics, I want to highlight the free Roboterführerschein (robots driving license) on robotikschulungen.de, which I co-developed. Hint: the Niryo courses are by me as well :)