The week-long PR2 Workshop in Freiburg was a success! Approximately 40 people participated in the workshop, which primarily consisted of a hackathon. Participants were divided into six teams with people from multiple different institutions. Teams tackled a variety of problems related to the ICRA sushi challenge (coming to ICRA this year!). The sushi challenge presents [...]
This week, most of the group is in Freiburg, Germany for the PR2 Workshop, graciously hosted by Wolfram Burgard’s group. This workshop is mostly a hackathon for the ICRA 2012 Sushi Boat Mobile Manipulation Challenge. Participant from various research groups were split into six teams to explore different approaches and aspects of the challenge, with [...]
Trevor strikes again with another great rosbridge tutorial. In helping to prepare for a demo in Washington last week, Trevor was able to quickly hack together a simple web page that used rosbridge for accelerometer-based robot teleop. He had the following video up-and-working within an hour or two. It is worth noting this is a [...]
Tom and I were fortunate enough to get invites to the “Impact of NITRD” Symposium last week. There were hugely inspiring talks from the people that founded the Internet and made it a reality. It was especially enlightening to hear Vint Cerf and The Honorable Al Gore talk about the challenges they faced in realizing [...]
Charlie Kemp’s Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech does great work in pushing the frontiers of robotics for assisting the physically disabled. Their robotics work in helping people with ALS and the elderly has been great to see, as well as the entertaining videos of the Dusty robot. One of their more inspiring projects is [...]
One of our favorite videos using of rosbridge comes from the Open Technology Lab. OTL created a homemade telepresence robot where users on the Internet only need their web browser to control and see the camera feed from a remote robot. As shown in their video, this works seamlessly across devices (such as an iPhone) [...]
It is great to see people using rosbridge for various robot applications. We just happened to run across a remote lab project for Robotnik’s Guardian robot that exposes mapping functionality through a web browser. Nice!
With some hard work from Arjun, our new KUKA YouBot is now working with ROS and can be remotely controlled over wifi. Chris very quickly added a rosbridge install and a simple web interface to control the robot from common web browsers on the Internet. The following video is Chad (at home 3 miles away) [...]
Working with our collaborators at Bosch LLC, the following screencap video was taken by Trevor (in Atlanta) who was teleoperating a PR2 robot (in Palo Alto) using the PR2 Remote Lab. Another reason to consider using rosbridge for web-based robotics, or at least learning more about it (rosbridge/Arduino tutorial). The YouTube page for this video [...]
Following his previous tutorial, Trevor has created a new video tutorial for using rosbridge to 1) very simply connect an Arduino device to ROS, and 2) use the device’s distance sensor to control the color of a webpage. Go to 25:08 to see the demo resulting from the tutorial: