Abstract-Developers and end-users have to interface robotic systems for control and feedback. Such systems are typically co-engineered with their graphical user interfaces. In the past, a vast community of researchers has addressed issues of generality, deployment, usability, and re-usability of user interfaces. However, the support for creating graphical user interfaces in recent robotic frameworks is limited. In particular, there is typically no support for web-based teleoperation. In this work, we propose a new Java-based editor with a plugin architecture for GUI elements and communication ports. Special focus is laid on platform-independent design, easy extensibility, connectivity to different robotic frameworks, usability and deployment. The tool offers convenient creation of graphical user interfaces and can publish them over the web -making them accessible from any Java-enabled web browser.
I. MOTIVATIONDevelopers and operators of technical systems need convenient access to control interfaces and state information. In the case of -but not limited to -mobile robotic systems, this interfacing software is deployed on external networked computers or mobile devices that carry the respective graphical user interface (GUI). Usually, during development a GUI is subject to multiple changes due to ongoing feature integration and debugging. Also, different human operators show different preferences in GUI design. This leads to the demand for editor tools capable of conveniently creating and editing GUIs. If well-designed, the GUI is free of system logic and is a separate component from the system to be controlled. Developers of robotic frameworks have already spent varying amounts of effort to provide such tooling. However, these tools are specifically designed to work with their respective frameworks and have limitations regarding flexibility and deployment. In section I-A, we discuss the capabilities of recent robotic development frameworks regarding these aspects.In this work, we propose a new Java-based GUI tool addressing the following areas:• editor for graphical user interfaces • independence from specific (robotic) applications and frameworks • extensible plugin architecture • web-based GUI deployment • robust handling of fluctuating connection link quality