Dear ROS users,
a few month ago we ported ROS to Windows (and Visual Studio) to
interface our Windows GUIs with our Linux robots running ROS. We faced a
couple of problems with this approach like stability, reactivity of the
GUI and restrictive network policies. In the end it turned out for us
that this is not the right way of passing information between ROS and
the Windows part.
We had contact to a couple of people being interested in the ROS windows
port. We still believe that ROS needs a Windows interface because most
end-users will accept Windows. We also know that we need something that
is compatible to all the restricted networks out there. This means that
we need a connection to ROS going over a single port (later on we would
even need html encoding to go through proxy servers).
Checking all the alternatives we ended up writing our own communication
library. We gave it a ROS compatible license and make it available under
http://servicerobotics.eu/en/other-projects/rec-rpc-library/
We provide a full featured example with a Qt-GUI interfacing the ROS
navigation stack. We know that the documentation is far from perfect but
its a starting point. Be aware of the fact that this library is based on
Qt. So if you don't like Qt it's not what you need.
Regards
Christian
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