[ros-users] rosjs: A Light-weight Javascript Binding for ROS

[Trevor Jay]

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:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baQSiJfmuvg

rosjs is currently available for download from the brown-ros-pkg
repository ( http://code.google.com/p/brown-ros-pkg/ ) 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)