Connecting YARP to the Web with Yarp.js

Abstract

We present yarp.js, a JavaScript framework enabling robotics networks to interface and interact with external devices by exploiting modern Web communication protocols. By connecting a YARP server module with a browser client on any external device, yarp.js allows to access on board sensors using standard Web APIs and stream the acquired data through the yarp.js network without the need for any installation. Communication between YARP modules and yarp.js clients is bi-directional, opening also the possibility for robotics applications to exploit the capabilities of modern browsers to process external data, such as speech synthesis, 3D data visualization, or video streaming to name a few. Yarp.js requires only a browser installed on the client device, allowing for fast and easy deployment of novel applications. The code and sample applications to get started with the proposed framework are available for the community at the yarp.js GitHub repository.

A RoboStack Tutorial: Using the Robot Operating System Alongside the Conda and Jupyter Data Science Ecosystems

“…Thanks to the ipywidgetification, these visualizations can be created without writing any JavaScript (which makes it significantly easier to use than e.g. YARP-JS [13]). 3.…”

Towards IoT-Aided Human–Robot Interaction Using NEP and ROS: A Platform-Independent, Accessible and Distributed Approach

“…The module that performs this transformation between protocols is often called a bridge server. Relevant state-of-art packages is the rosbridge suite [8] and yarp.js [9]. As described in the official ROS documentation [10], rosbridge is composed of two parts: the protocol and the implementation.…”

“…Any future reference to "rosbridge" in this article is made over the rosbridge implementation and not about the rosbridge protocol. In [9], yarp.js is defined as "a JavaScript framework enabling robotics networks to interface and interact with external devices by exploiting modern Web communication protocols". Similar to the rosbridge suite, yarp.js also requires the use of a bridge server implementation [9].…”

“…However, they become relevant when building complex HRI applications requiring: (i) the streaming of high volume of data and sensory information at high rates, and (ii) to be performed in long-term and unstructured Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) studies outside laboratories. Moreover, solutions such as rosbridge in ROS 1.0 and yarp.js force non-Linux users to acquire and configure an additional computer with Ubuntu to enable the execution of the bridge server from which all messages need to go through [8,9]. This paper explains how the Node Primitives (NEP) robot programming framework can be used for enabling user-friendly development of cross-platform and distributed IoT-aided Human-Robot Interaction software architectures and applications.…”