Community Bonding - Week 2

I had my first videoconference with my mentors, during which they welcomed me to the community, outlined the plans for weekly meetings, and provided me with additional information on the project.

Goals

• To find out more about new widgets such as worldview, robot web tools, and rosboard etc.

• How to include an external javascript library to react ?

• Identify the basic and frequent components of the Robot Academy exercises.

Accomplishment and Challenges

• Explore Widgets [Task 1]

  The main objective of the task is to figure out the usage of such tools and how can the Robot Academy accommodates these tools.

  • Robot web tools : Robot web tools is a collection of open-source libraries and tools for building web-based robot apps with ROS. I explored about various libraries, tools and ros nodes.

    • ros2djs - It is a standard Javascript 2D visualization manager for ROS. I read about the tutorial where ros2djs was used to visualiza a map.

    • ros3djs - It is a standard Javascript 3D visualization manager for ROS. I read about the tutorial where ros2djs was used to visualiza a map.

    • rosbridge - It is a JSON interface to ROS that allows any client to post or subscribe to ROS topics, call ROS services, and more.

  • Worldview : Worldview is a React library for rendering 2D and 3D scenes using regl. Worldview is a powerful tool helps in rendering 3d objects in a scene, manage the camera, and add mouse interactions. Explored some basics examples to get more comfortable with worldview and read about the API on Worldview, Camera, Commands and Mouse events.

  • Rosboard : ROS Node that runs a web server on your robot. This tool gives nice visaulizations. It is light weight and Easily extensible. It is developed on custom tornado-based websocket bridge.

  • Foxglove studio : Foxglove Studio is an integrated visualization and diagnosis tool for robotics. This tool provides interactive charts, and 3d visualizations, to camera iamges and diagnostics feeds. A Docker image is provided to make self-hosting easy.

    $ docker run --rm -p "8080:8080" ghcr.io/foxglove/studio:latest
  

• Including External javascript Library into react [Task 2]

  I found an article which helped me understanding how it could be achieved. Three Approaches are discussed in the article. These are-

  • Using react-script-tag Package.
  • Using react-helmet Package.
  • Using JavaScript DOM Methods.

  I tried finding the best approach by making small examples and figured out the best approach would be Using JavaScript DOM Methods as it does not require to install any external package, making our application light and fast.

• Explore Robot Academy exercises [Task 3]

  The objective is to find resuable and basic components in the exercises to begin with the refractoring process.

  $ docker run --rm -it -p 8000:8000 -p 2303:2303 -p 1905:1905 -p 8765:8765 -p 6080:6080 -p 1108:1108 jderobot/robotics-academy
  

  Common Components -

  1. Navigation Bar
  2. Ace editor
  3. Gazebo (simulation)
     
  4. Console

Laser Mapping

Exploring Laser mapping exercise

Obstacle Avoidance

Exploring Obstacle avoidance exercise

Vacuum Cleaner

Exploring Vacuum cleaner exercise