eProsima presents visual-ROS

[Katrin_Kellner]

Hello!

Here at eProsima, we are on the verge of undertaking a new adventure, in which we’ll combine our long-term expertise, historically focused on low-to-mid level development, with the realm of graphical interfaces, in order to deliver a brand new product to the ROS community: visual-ROS.

This tool is meant to provide a user-friendly web-based graphical IDE for programming with ROS 2. The idea behind this solution is to shrink the gap between domains which know little if anything about programming and the robotics world, with the goal of opening the ROS 2 gates for an unprecedented number of beginners and newbies belonging to a bunch of different areas.

The implementation will be based on Node-RED, an open-source browser-based graphical editor allowing low-code programming of event-driven applications. To this end, Node-RED offers a simple way to link together customizable nodes to generate flows, which are deployed to the runtime and stored into exportable JSON files. A SOSS instance based on its Websocket System-Handle will be then in charge to convert these flows into an interface understandable by ROS 2, providing users with an out-of-the-box and seamless experience to generate programs with basic ROS functionalities (nodes, publishers/subscriptions, services, complex types…).

At the end of the day, users will be provided with a unique tool combining all of eProsima’s leading technologies such as Fast DDS, the Integration Service (SOSS) and our implementation of the DDS-XTypes, cooperating to smash the entry-level barriers to the ROS 2 world down to a minimum level.

We’re already hands-on: stay tuned and spread the word!

[Katrin_Kellner]

For explanatory reasons, please find the visual-ROS architecture below:

And for some additional information also visit the eProsima website.

[kyrofa]

This is interesting, @Katrin_Kellner, thank you for sharing. This type of simulink-ish programming ability was one of the use-cases that drove the development of the NoDL, to statically describe the interfaces of individual nodes so they can be “connected” at design-time instead of only at run-time. Is that something you might find useful here, or are you going about that differently?

Anyway, that functionality exists (and is under active development) in Foxy and Rolling in case you’d like to chat. Right now we’re primarily using it for security purposes, but we’d love to have another solid use-case, particularly one that we always hoped would happen .

[Jaime_Martin_Losa]

Hi @kyrofa

Thanks for pointing this out. I think it would be very nice to integrate NoDL in Visual-ROS. Our team is already studying how to do that, we will keep you posted.

[Arnatious]

@Jaime_Martin_Losa: NoDL is also open to feature requests. It’s a minimal implementation currently, just what’s needed for automating key generation and enabling encyption.

[Jaime_Martin_Losa]

Thanks @Arnatious,

As soon we have a more clear design and requirements, I will propose you guys a meeting.