ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

rosbridge_suite

If we want to interact with the ROS framework from our web browser, there should be some system that can convert the web browser commands to the ROS topics/services. rosbridge provides a JSON interface to ROS, allowing any client to send JSON commands (http://www.json.org/) to publish or subscribe to ROS topics, call ROS services, and more. rosbridge supports a variety of transport layers, including WebSockets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket) and TCP.

The rosbridge_suite (http://wiki.ros.org/rosbridge_suite) is a meta-ROS package having an implementation of the rosbridge protocol. The JSON commands are converted to ROS topics/services using a node called rosbridge_server. This node can send or receive JSON commands ...