Abstract

The problem of developing GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) for robots is one that typically requires knowledge of robotics programming and web or desktop GUI development to communicate the user’s inputs to a robot, and to communicate a robot’s state and outputs to the user. This project introduces a FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software) JS (JavaScript) library: ‘RWC’ (ROS Web Components) (Elliott, 2019a), which utilises the also FOSS ‘ROS’ (Robot Operating System) (Quigley et al., 2019). RWC simplifies the development of web-based GUIs for HRI (Human-Robot Interaction), by exposing common robot behaviours and data through one-line JS function calls, and defining custom HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) elements which can call these functions to display data or send user input to a robot. RWC requires only beginner level knowledge of HTML or JS, and ROS, to enable rapid and easy development of web-based UIs for HRI. RWC is configurable, with more experienced users able to define their own ROS topics and action servers for the library to interface.