Universal web interfaces for robot control frameworks

Abstract

Developers and end-users have to interface robotic systems for control and feedback. Such systems are typically co-engineered with their graphical user interfaces. In the past, a vast community of researchers has addressed issues of generality, deployment, usability, and re-usability of user interfaces. However, the support for creating graphical user interfaces in recent robotic frameworks is limited. In particular, there is typically no support for Web-based teleoperation. In this work, we propose a new Java-based editor with a plugin architecture for GUI elements and communication ports. Special focus is laid on platform-independent design, easy extensibility, connectivity to different robotic frameworks, usability and deployment. The tool offers convenient creation of graphical user interfaces and can publish them over the Web - making them accessible from any Java-enabled Web browser.