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) that have modern web browsers.
It is also great to see rosbridge appear in some of their other projects
We definitely recommend checking out the OTL blog for their incredible robot projects. It is awesome to see rosbridge and other contributions (such as ardrone_brown) from brown-ros-pkg show up in these projects.
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) driving the robot on campus from a web browser (Google Chrome)
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).
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:
Having trouble using ROS with your robot in ROS in your favorite environment (e.g. Windows, Arduino, web browser, Android, iPhone)? If so, rosbridge provides a means to use all of what ROS has to offer purely through network messaging.
Trevor has posted a great video tutorial for no-frills lightweight usage of rosbridge from the command line. Just by sending simple JSON formatted strings, you can publish and subscribe to ROS topics, perform introspection, and more. The video assumes familiarity with Unix command line tools and publish-subscribe messaging in ROS.
Brown Robotics held a hackathon in the final week of January 2012. We implemented a block building node for the PR2, which drives the PR2 to pick up toy blocks and place them according to a user-specified design.
Would you like to see a robot give a high five by just asking it to? Brian Thomas, from the Brown University Robotics Group, came up with a way to command robots to give a high five and perform many other actions using spoken or written language. During his internship at Willow Garage, Brian developed a system, called RoboFrameNet, so that robots respond to pre-programmed spoken or written human language actions.
After 15 months of waiting, our Kuka YouBot finally arrived, or at least the base has arrived. I saw working prototype of the YouBot at IROS 2008 and, since then, have been anxiously anticipating getting one of these for the lab. This is one of the few commercial-off-the-shelf mobile manipulation platforms, although we will do no manipulation with it until the arm arrives (expected “Week 12″ of 2012). Until then, we hope use the platform in some interesting projects involving rosbridge and like the remote lab. However, it seems that we first have to address a few issues with the software that came with the YouBot.
