Brown University Robotics http://brown-robotics.org/wp Robotics, Learning and Autonomy at Brown Wed, 22 Feb 2012 03:20:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 rosbridge/iPhone video tutorial http://brown-robotics.org/wp/rosbridgeiphone-video-tutorial/ http://brown-robotics.org/wp/rosbridgeiphone-video-tutorial/#comments Wed, 22 Feb 2012 03:20:13 +0000 cjenkins http://brown-robotics.org/wp/?p=960 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 zero-install demo. The iPhone uses Safari to navigate to the page Trevor created, and it just works.

If you are interested in how this works, Trevor’s rosbridge/iPhone tutorial goes over the basics of creating a web page that can access the iPhone’s accelerometry and connect to rosbridge. Go to 13:10 to see the demo that results from the tutorial.

]]> http://brown-robotics.org/wp/rosbridgeiphone-video-tutorial/feed/ 0 Demo at NITRD symposium http://brown-robotics.org/wp/demo-at-nitrd-symposium/ http://brown-robotics.org/wp/demo-at-nitrd-symposium/#comments Wed, 22 Feb 2012 03:02:24 +0000 cjenkins http://brown-robotics.org/wp/?p=957 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 something that we now take for granted. We were invited by the NSF to give demo of low-cost robot platforms (i.e., the Turtlebot) that are accessible to a variety of citizen scientists. Thanks to Willow Garage their person follower that worked great, and Trevor for hacking some quick code for Turtlebot teleop with iPhone and Wiimotes.

IMAG1189

]]> http://brown-robotics.org/wp/demo-at-nitrd-symposium/feed/ 0 rosbridge in action: Robots for Humanity http://brown-robotics.org/wp/rosbridge-in-action-robots-for-humanity/ http://brown-robotics.org/wp/rosbridge-in-action-robots-for-humanity/#comments Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:41:09 +0000 cjenkins http://brown-robotics.org/wp/?p=952 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 the Robots for Humanity project with Willow Garage. This project has created various interfaces and packages (such as assistive_teleop using rosbridge) to enable disabled users to control a PR2 and perform various daily living tasks.

]]> http://brown-robotics.org/wp/rosbridge-in-action-robots-for-humanity/feed/ 0 rosbridge in action: OTL Telepresence Robot http://brown-robotics.org/wp/rosbridge-in-action-otl-telepresence-robot/ http://brown-robotics.org/wp/rosbridge-in-action-otl-telepresence-robot/#comments Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:25:19 +0000 cjenkins http://brown-robotics.org/wp/?p=950 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

http://ros-robot.blogspot.com/2011/12/blog-post.html

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.

]]> http://brown-robotics.org/wp/rosbridge-in-action-otl-telepresence-robot/feed/ 0 rosbridge in action: Guardian Remote Lab http://brown-robotics.org/wp/rosbridge-in-action-guardian-remote-lab/ http://brown-robotics.org/wp/rosbridge-in-action-guardian-remote-lab/#comments Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:04:24 +0000 cjenkins http://brown-robotics.org/wp/?p=948 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!

]]> http://brown-robotics.org/wp/rosbridge-in-action-guardian-remote-lab/feed/ 0 Kuka YouBot working with wifi teleop http://brown-robotics.org/wp/kuka-youbot-working-with-wifi-teleop/ http://brown-robotics.org/wp/kuka-youbot-working-with-wifi-teleop/#comments Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:54:08 +0000 cjenkins http://brown-robotics.org/wp/?p=941 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)

]]> http://brown-robotics.org/wp/kuka-youbot-working-with-wifi-teleop/feed/ 0 PR2 clearing a table with HTML5 and point clouds http://brown-robotics.org/wp/pr2-clearing-a-table-with-html5-and-point-clouds/ http://brown-robotics.org/wp/pr2-clearing-a-table-with-html5-and-point-clouds/#comments Wed, 15 Feb 2012 23:14:00 +0000 cjenkins http://brown-robotics.org/wp/?p=923 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 has more information about the details of this implementation.

]]> http://brown-robotics.org/wp/pr2-clearing-a-table-with-html5-and-point-clouds/feed/ 0 rosbridge/Arduino video tutorial http://brown-robotics.org/wp/rosbridgearduino-video-tutorial/ http://brown-robotics.org/wp/rosbridgearduino-video-tutorial/#comments Wed, 15 Feb 2012 23:05:17 +0000 cjenkins http://brown-robotics.org/wp/?p=921 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:

]]> http://brown-robotics.org/wp/rosbridgearduino-video-tutorial/feed/ 0 rosbridge in 10 minutes video tutorial http://brown-robotics.org/wp/rosbridge-in-10-minutes/ http://brown-robotics.org/wp/rosbridge-in-10-minutes/#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:58:43 +0000 cjenkins http://brown-robotics.org/wp/?p=905 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.

Trevor’s tutorial notes

]]> http://brown-robotics.org/wp/rosbridge-in-10-minutes/feed/ 0 PR2 Hackathon Video! http://brown-robotics.org/wp/pr2-hackathon-video/ http://brown-robotics.org/wp/pr2-hackathon-video/#comments Tue, 07 Feb 2012 05:58:46 +0000 Jon Mace http://brown-robotics.org/wp/?p=876 Jihoon put together a great video for the block builder hackathon. Check it out:

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