Beam Bots (or just BB for short) is a framework for building fault-tolerant robotics applications in Elixir using familiar OTP patterns.

Why?

When you look at ROS2’s architecture, so much of what it provides maps directly to BEAM/OTP patterns:

• ROS2’s pubsub → Phoenix.PubSub, Registry, process messaging
• ROS2’s Services → GenServer.call/3
• ROS2’s Actions → supervised Task with progress messages
• ROS2’s Controllers → GenServers with state machines
• ROS2’s parameter system → ETS

The BEAM already gives you fault tolerance, concurrency, soft real-time performance, and good behaviour in resource-constrained environments. BB builds on that
foundation.

See harton.nz • Elixir for Robots for more

Features

• Spark DSL for declarative robot definitions - your code mirrors your robot’s physical structure
• Topology-based supervision - the supervision tree mirrors your robot topology for fault isolation
• Physical units with the ~u sigil - ~u(90 degree), ~u(0.5 meter), ~u(10 newton_meter)
• Forward kinematics using Nx (GPU-accelerated where supported)
• Hierarchical PubSub for sensor data with message type filtering
• URDF export for integration with ROS visualisation tools

Current Status

Early days - the framework compiles, tests pass, and the DSL works, but it hasn’t controlled physical robots yet. I’m currently building a rover to close that loop.
Looking for feedback and contributors.

Read harton.nz • Announcing Beam Bots: Resilient Robotics on the BEAM for more details.

Links

• README — bb v0.2.1
• bb | Hex

Tutorials

See the tutorials for a guided introduction:

1. Your First Robot - defining robots with the DSL
2. Starting and Stopping - supervision trees
3. Sensors and PubSub - publishing and subscribing to messages
4. Forward Kinematics - computing link positions
5. Commands and State Machine - controlling the robot
6. Exporting to URDF - interoperability with ROS tools
7. Parameters - runtime-adjustable configuration
8. Parameter Bridges - bidirectional remote access

The DSL Reference documents all available options.