Robots as web services: Reproducible experimentation and application development using rosjs

Abstract

Abstract-We describe our efforts to create infrastructure to enable web interfaces for robotics. Such interfaces will enable researchers and users to remotely access robots through the internet as well as expand the types of robotic applications available to users with web-enabled devices. This paper centers on rosjs, a lightweight Javascript binding for ROS, Willow Garage's robot middleware framework. rosjs exposes many of the capabilities of ROS, allowing application developers to write controllers that are executed through a web browser. We discuss how rosjs extends ROS and briefly overview some of the features it provides. rosjs has been instrumental in the creation of remote laboratories featuring the iRobot Create and the PR2. These facilities will be available to the community as experimental resources. We describe the overall goals of this project as well as provide a brief description of how rosjs was used to help create web interfaces for these facilities.

Message authentication codes for secure remote non-native client connections to ROS enabled robots

“…As exemplified in work such as [9], [11], [2], [12], [13], the ability to utilize these non-native clients will allow roboticists to utilize a wider range and more diverse group of users and researchers. Nevertheless, with the growing momentum behind such easy to use lightweight protocols and techniques, it becomes ever more important to ensure these environments are run in a safe and secure manner.…”

“…One such client implementation is the ROS JavaScript library suite [9]. This library, developed as part of the Robot Web Tools effort [10], allows web browsers to communicate with and visualize data to and from ROS.…”

A web-based infrastructure for recording user demonstrations of mobile manipulation tasks

“…The PR2 Remote Lab is presented in [15]; it provides the infrastructure necessary to control a PR2 through the web, allowing robots to be used as web services by users without physical access to them [12]. In [13], such a robot web service was used in research on robotic LfD.…”

Connecting YARP to the Web with Yarp.js

“…The above motivations are shared with recent work (Osentoski et al, 2011;Toris et al, 2015), where a JavaScript framework was developed to allow portable devices to communicate with the Robot Operating System (ROS) using Websockets and JavaScript. In this sense, the client side of yarp.js can be interpreted as the equivalent of the ros.js framework for the YARP environment, and one interesting byproduct of this work is the possibility to create applications that naturally bridge YARP and ROS frameworks by leveraging the two corresponding JavaScript libraries.…”