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The turtlesim_dash_tutorial package

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Installation
  3. ROS Nodes
    1. turtle_dashboard

Introduction

This package is designed to provide a quick and dirty tutorial on how to quickly create a Web UI for a ROS environment with Dash. As backbone for this tutorial, we'll use ROS's turtle_actionlib.

The default launch file included in this package, tutorial.launch brings up a turtlesim environment and starts turtle_actionlib's shape_server node. As mentioned in the documentation for turtle_actionlib, the node is designed to control the simulated turtlebot so that it traces out a polygon of a specified radius with the desired number of edges.

The launch file also starts a Dash webserver on the port 8080. On navigating to that URL, you should see a web page like so:

Page on startup

There are 3 elements to the page that you can play with:

  1. The input boxes set the number of edges and the radius of the polygon that the turtlebot should trace out in the simulated environment. Hitting the Trace Shape button sends those parameters to the shape_server if the values are valid.

  2. The shape server's status is shown below the inputs. This is simply the status of the ROS actionlib server.

  3. The graph plots the last 30 seconds (approximately) of the turtlebot's pose and velocity in the simulator.

Here is an example of the page as the turtlebot is executing a ShapeGoal:

Page during turtlebot execution

Installation

  1. Install turtle_actionlib: sudo apt install ros-melodic-turtle-actionlib

  2. Install the pip dependencies (in a virtualenv if need be): pip install -r requirements.txt

  3. Create a catkin workspace and include this package in it. Build the workspace.

To test your installation, source the newly created workspace and run:

 roslaunch turtlesim_dash_tutorial tutorial.launch 

ROS Nodes

turtle_dashboard

Creates a dash server on the port 8080; navigate to http://localhost:8080 in order to view it.

2024-12-07 18:24