robot management

[Peter_heim]

After spending a couple of months concentrating on building the omni base for my robot its was time to start running the robot with all its previous features and functions. I was shocked to discover how much I had forgotten like what launch file was the best or worked and what features worked. To make matter worse I have 2 robots to play with so keeping track of capabilities is starting to be an issue


some of the functions that the robot is capable of


voice commands
face detecting tracking and recognition
various action servers
arm navigation
joy stick control of driving and moving the head
various AI examples
web interface
along with the basics
arbotix
usbtodynamixel
simple arm server
Omni controller
Arduino interface


What I'm after is
a way to start and stop various features and display robot status information from a central point.
Group launch files that work together
other people able to control the robot and run it


Webui was a good starting point but it appears not to be in development. Android control was another one of the features I forgot about but since I mainly use a computer with large screens it doesn't seem to be a option(i may be wrong)


Dose anyone have any ideas on how manage this?

Regards
Peter

[Pi Robot]

Hi Peter,

One option might be rosbridge + mjpeg server. Scott Bell wrote such an interface for my pi_face_tracker ROS package. You can find Scott's write-up at:

http://www.pirobot.org/blog/0026

And you can go straight to his HTML file at:

http://pi-robot-ros-pkg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pi_vision/pi_face_tracker_gui/pi_face_tracker_gui.html

To learn about rosbridge and mjpeg_server (in case you don't know already):

http://www.ros.org/wiki/rosbridge/Tutorials

and

http://www.ros.org/wiki/mjpeg_server

--patrick

[Peter_heim]

Hi Patrick
I had a good play with rosbridge and face tracker and i think it will do what i want (with more learning). What i did find is every so often when using face tracker (or the example to for driving the robot) it would freeze and require a reload (i was doing a lot of button pushingto see what happened)

also it only worked when i loaded the page on the remote machine (using localhost)changing the address in the html page and loading the htlm on another machine (10.1.1.8) nothing happened. I haven't found anywhere on how to configure rosbridge to work with a web server (i tried to serve the page as on port 9090 but i got errors with rosbridge). If Scott could do a write up on that it would be great

Peter
ps Recieved your email on computer vision and learning this morning i look forward to more

peter

[bellscotcv]

Hi there,
Patrick Goebel just pointed me in the direction of this thread and I would be happy to help you out, although it will be a day or two before I can take a crack at it.
To make sure I am working on the issue you need let me verify I am following the issue.
Basically you want to be able to run the web server on the robots, system to expose the html page over the local network and then access and "use" the web interface from a remote system. Do I have it correct?
Thanks,
-Scott

[Peter_heim]

Hi Scott
Thanks for the reply in a nut shell that's it. the time frame is no problem

peter

[bellscotcv]

Hi again Peter,
Finally able to come up for air and look at this as my robotics club I host is over with school letting out.
I am running into a bit of a snag though as I had to reinstall ubuntu and ros (electric) on my laptop and now I am unable to compile the pi_face_tracker (rosmake) as it is saying I am missing all kinds of dependencies, some of which I know I have installed, so a bit frustrating at the moment.
Nonetheless, this has my full attention at the moment and I will try very hard to get this going for you. Sorry for the delay. Talk to you soon.
-Scott