How to control a physical robot using a web interface

Question

I would like to know how I could control the movement of a physical robot using a web interface. For example, I have created a web interface with four movement buttons (front, back, left, right) but do not know how to connect that interface to the physical robot and control its movements. I have experience in controlling a simulated Turtlebot (in Gazebo) with the interface locally on my laptop using ROSBRIDGE and SimpleHTTPServer. Would I have to use these as well to control a physical robot?

I'm running ROS2 Crystal, Ubuntu 18.04. Thank you!

Answer 1

Yes, The interface to control a physical robot would be the same as simulation.
You will need to to publish control command to /cmd_vel topic and then you can subscribe to the topic to convert those velocity commands to actual motor commands.

You can also look into using Robot Web Tools for the web interface.

Additionally if you could provide more detiails about your setup I could give more information.

Answer 2

You can also use existing tools that allow you to quickly connect to your robot without having to build the communication infrastructure yourself. An example of that is Freedom Robotics platform that includes a variety of teleop tools for ROS.

You can find more information here (a post from their Head of Robotics) or try out for free.

I used this for a few of my personal projects and it saved me from all the hassle of creating the web interface and the API communication with ROS.