RESTful Robotic control

Over at Greenzie we just banged out a quick admin/technician debugging interface to allow us to send commands to our robot running ROS (1), and since I’m a recovering backend web application developer, I built a simple RESTful interface for our robots.

That means you can do actions on our mower like:

GET http://<ip-address-of-robot/pause
or
GET http://<ip-address-of-robot/resume

And you can define what commands, be they rosservice calls, commands, or getting back data via simple single rostopic commands.

Yes, I realize it’s not fully RESTful, (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) but close. And easy.

We looked hard at rosbridge_suite and love the concept of WebSockets. We plan on using this for some other fun things, but this was just quick and dirty.

Note: all our robots are on a private VPN over 3G/LTE and thus aren’t open to public internet.

Any other interest in us open sourcing or comments/critiques or just plain: “That’s crazy, why would you do that?”

– CBQ