August 25, 2025
Dave Coleman, Chief Product Officer, spoke at Northwest Robotics Alliance in June, 2025. If you missed it, catch the recording!
Great developer UX in robotics means giving engineers the right tool for the task—code when you need it, UI when you don’t. This talk explores how visual programming with Behavior Trees can streamline development and debugging of complex robot behaviors, while still allowing seamless drop-down to C++, Python, or other languages when custom logic is required.
We’ll share lessons from leveraging LLMs to build behavior trees to simplify the process, as well as designing human-in-the-loop workflows for when operator supervision is required. We’ll discuss how visual abstractions can reduce friction, improve reliability, and speed up iteration. These ideas come to life in the MoveIt Pro Robotics Platform, where we’ve built a hybrid low-code platform that helps teams ship sophisticated arm manipulation systems faster—with fewer surprises.
MoveIt Pro is PickNik Robotics’ commercial robotics software platform that extends the capabilities of the open-source MoveIt project. Designed for unstructured environments, MoveIt Pro provides powerful tools for motion planning, grasping, perception, and behavior sequencing. With pre-built robot behaviors and a modular runtime architecture, MoveIt Pro significantly reduces engineering effort and time-to-deployment. Its hardware-agnostic design supports a wide range of commercial and custom robotic arms, making it ideal for scalable automation across space, manufacturing, and logistics sectors.
