Beam Bots

Why Elixir

Sweet BEAM was made for this

Robots are concurrent, failure-prone, real-time systems on flaky hardware. The BEAM (Elixir's runtime) has spent decades solving exactly that in telecoms, with the same toolkit you already reach for in Elixir.

What robotics demands

Resilience in the face of partial hardware failure
Concurrency across dozens of sensors and actuators
Real-time control under deadline pressure
Live observability and tuning without restarts
Distributed coordination across boards and machines

From the BEAM, for free

Supervision trees that isolate failure
A lightweight process per component
Soft-real-time scheduling without GC pauses
Hot code reload with live introspection
Distributed Erlang across nodes

Built for Resilient Robotics

The building blocks for reliable robot systems, powered by OTP supervision and Elixir's expressive syntax.

🧩

Declarative DSL

Define robot topology with code that mirrors physical structure. Links, joints, sensors, and actuators nest as they exist in reality, in a syntax that stays readable as your robot grows.

🛡️

Topology-Based Supervision

Supervision trees mirror your robot's structure for fault isolation. A failing gripper doesn't crash the whole system.

📐

Forward & Inverse Kinematics

Compute link positions with Nx tensors, GPU-accelerated where supported, and solve reach with pluggable IK solvers: Damped Least Squares and FABRIK.

📡

Hierarchical PubSub

Subscribe to sensor data by path with type filtering. Get all IMU data from the left arm with a single subscription.

🔌

Hardware Drivers Included

Drive real servos out of the box (PCA9685, Dynamixel, Feetech, and Raspberry Pi GPIO), with more drivers across the ecosystem.

🕹️

Live Visualisation & Control

Drive and monitor your robot in real time with Livebook widgets or a Phoenix LiveView dashboard.

Code That Reads Like a Specification

This is a complete pan-tilt camera mount (every link, joint, and movement limit) in a few dozen lines. It reads more like a description of the hardware than a program that builds it.

And it's ordinary Elixir: version it, test its geometry, refactor it freely. Need a six-legged robot? Loop over the leg instead of copy-pasting it.

Start with Your First Robot

defmodule PanTiltCamera do
  use BB

  topology do
    link :base_link do
      visual do
        cylinder do
          radius ~u(0.03 meter)
          height ~u(0.02 meter)
        end
      end

      joint :pan_joint do
        type :revolute
        origin do
          z ~u(0.015 meter)
        end

        limit do
          lower ~u(-170 degree)
          upper ~u(170 degree)
        end

        link :pan_link do
          joint :tilt_joint do
            type :revolute
            limit do
              lower ~u(-45 degree)
              upper ~u(90 degree)
            end

            link :camera_link
          end
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

A Young Project, Moving Fast

Beam Bots is early and built in the open. Real hardware, real drivers, real momentum. Whether you want to drive a servo, write a driver, improve the docs, or just follow along, there's room for you.

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