Have you looked at Scratch -- http://scratch.mit.edu
I believe that you can do hardware control from Scratch.
A simple parser on the robot end would enable
you to send commands over wire or XBee.Scratch gets you beyond the semicolons and
curly brackets.
I have seen scratch but I would not have thought it as a very good tool to try to control hardware from, It would probably be much too complicated to get it to do that.
Logicator is a popular one is schools for PIC chips and smartboxes for the less electronically minded.
Coupled with the simple hardware models you can make, it can be good but it is rather limited. Once you have made a traffic light, you have made it all!
Mowcius