Light-weight Javascript Binding for ROS

Announcement from Trevor Jay of Brown's RLAB

Brown is pleased to announce our beta version of rosjs, a light-weight Javascript binding for ROS.

rosjs is designed to enable users and developers to use the functionality of ROS through standard web browsers. Applications developers can leverage all of the power of HTML to build engaging applications and interfaces for robots as quickly as possible without recompiling ROS nodes. Additionally, users can access and run ROS-based applications from standard browsers without the need for any plugins.

rosjs consists of a server and a pure Javascript library. rosjs is not tied to any particular web-server or framework; it even works when served locally. Using websockets, latency is low enough for teleoperation or closed loop control. For example, the following video shows a user teleoperating the PR2 via rosjs from Providence to Palo Alto:

rosjs is currently available for download from the brown-ros-pkg repository via:

svn co https://brown-ros-pkg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/experimental/rosjs rosjs

and you can view preliminary documentation here:

http://code.google.com/p/brown-ros-pkg/wiki/rosjs

We are making rosjs available now for the ROS community to use and provide feedback. Please play, create, and break stuff; then tell us about it.

Thanks again to the kind people at Bosch and Willow for use of their PR2.

_Robot Learning and Autonomy @ Brown (RLAB)