What is MOV.AI Flow™ ?

MOV.AI Flow™ is an open Integrated Development Environment (IDE) designed especially for ROS and developed by MOV.AI.

It adds a visual layer to ROS as-well-as parameter structuring and built-in state machine. The ROS ecosystem is integrated into the IDE.

This visual IDE speeds up and streamlines ROS development by allowing quick project understanding, reducing configuration and integration work, speeding up debugging and making it easier to import assets, port projects across environments and share with the community.

MOV.AI Flow™ is a source available tool. The source files are available on GitHub.

Background

MOV.AI Flow™ was developed by Limor Schweitzer as a byproduct of working with ROS to develop a robot using ROS. As he developed the robot, they also built tools to make their lives easier – a visual IDE.

Born out of ROS, and true to open source culture, these tools are shared back with the ROS community in the form of MOV.AI Flow™.

Helping the ROS Community Thrive

One of the main goals of releasing MOV.AI Flow™ is to help the ROS community grow and thrive. The source files are freely available on GitHub – we encourage download and development under the source available license. Anyone can download them and we encourage new commits.

We’d love to hear and share with the community any cool ways you’ve made use of MOV.AI Flow™. Whether you are an experienced programmer that drastically sped up development times, or a beginner that figured out something fun, we want to know about, and the community does too. Share it with us by email, our forum, or on our social media, whatever you prefer.

Born out of ROS, and true to open source culture, these tools are shared back with the ROS community in the form of MOV.AI Flow™.

Simplicity

MOV.AI does all the hard work for you. It enables you to use provided robot behavior flows or to quickly set up new flows and then to reconfigure them within minutes.

• Ready-made Flows – MOV.AI Flow™ provides a variety of ready-made flows that perform typical task sequences for each type of supported robot, such as mapping localization, autonomous navigation, pick and drop and more.

• Drag-and-Drop Ready-Made Nodes – MOV.AI Flow™ provides a wide variety of ready-made nodes (encapsulated with all appropriate drivers, when relevant), each which performs a different robot function. These nodes enable you to define autonomous mobile robot behavior by dragging and dropping in order to build a flow of nodes based on conditions.

• Easily Define Complex Behavior Logic – MOV.AI Flow™ is simple, yet powerful features that enable you to easily pick and choose functionality in a simple user interface in order to define complex logic for optimal robot behavior. Each flow can be used for different types of robots.

• Simulation and Visualization – Transparent predefined integration with Gazebo Fortress and RViz. The flows described in this guide demonstrate how MOV.AI leverages and transparently integrates with Gazebo Fortress and RViz to give you the best of all worlds while developing your robot functionality. MOV.AI Flow™, Gazebo Fortress and RViz are already connected and configured to work together behind the scenes for you.