Robot Web Tools: Efficient messaging for cloud robotics

Since its official introduction in 2012, the Robot Web Tools project has grown tremendously as an open-source community, enabling new levels of interoperability and portability across heterogeneous robot systems, devices, and front-end user interfaces. At the heart of Robot Web Tools is the rosbridge protocol as a general means for messaging ROS topics in a client-server paradigm suitable for wide area networks, and human-robot interaction at a global scale through modern web browsers. Building from rosbridge, this paper describes our efforts with Robot Web Tools to advance: 1) human-robot interaction through usable client and visualization libraries for more efficient development of front-end human-robot interfaces, and 2) cloud robotics through more efficient methods of transporting high-bandwidth topics (e.g., kinematic transforms, image streams, and point clouds). We further discuss the significant impact of Robot Web Tools through a diverse set of use cases that showcase the importance of a generic messaging protocol and front-end development systems for human-robot interaction.