freeboard_ros

freeboard_ros is a proof-of-concept ROS wrapper for freeboard realtime dashboard using roslibjs. The long term goal of this project is to make it easier to create embeddable real-time dashboards for robots running ROS.

Approach & Roadmap

• Create a roslibjs plugin for freeboard: Our local fork of freeboad includes a proof-of-concept plugin for freeboard that enables freeboard to connect to a local rosbridge server and expose any ROS topic as a data source in freeboard. Development is done in ros-dev branch. This fork is embedded in this git repository as a git submodule.

• Serve freeboard dashboard using a standalone ROS Node: scripts/freeboard_ros.py is a standalone ROS node that serves freeboard as a web application using Bottle.

• Load all javascript dependencies locally (Not Started)

• Port Robot Web Tools widgets to freeboard (Not Started)

• Make communication between ROS and freeboard two way (Not Started)

Download and Compile Instructions

Note: python-bottle is not yet added to rosdep database, therefor you need to install it manually either using apt-get or pip (on Ubuntu the package is called python-bottle).

$ cd /path/to/catkin_ws
$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/AutonomyLab/freeboard_ros.git src/freeboard_ros
# -r is to ignore rosdep error for python-bottle
$ rosdep install --from-paths src -i -r
$ catkin_make # or catkin build

Usage

$ roslaunch rosbridge_server rosbridge_websocket.launch
$ rosrun freeboard_ros freeboard_ros.py _host:=HOST/LOCALIP _port:=3274 _debug:=True

Sample launch file:

<launch>
    <include file="$(find rosbridge_server)/launch/rosbridge_websocket.launch"/>
    <node pkg="freeboard_ros" name="freeboard_ros" type="freeboard_ros.py" output="screen">
        <param name="~host" value="192.168.1.52"/>
        <param name="~port" value="3274"/>
        <param name="~debug" value="True"/>
    </node>
</launch>

• Open http://[HOST or LOCALIP]:3274/freeboard/ in your browser.
• Add a data source of type ROS Subscriber, type in the topic name, refresh rate and a preferred name for this source.
• The source will be available to use (as a JSON data structure) in any of freeboard's widgets.