Control FTC4314's robot over the web

[BornaE]

We have created an applet to control our teams robot over the web.
the url is here: http://team0x27.org/robot/

please be courteous and do not stall the motors or drive into anything.

the robot may or may not be available at all times.
If you cannot connect it means somebody else is connected at the moment so you can keep trying to connect.

I will try to get a video stream up so you can watch the robot even if you are not driving it.

[BornaE]

After a few people driving it, it seems like we need to find a more foolproof environment for the robot. many things that can go wrong in the current locations. Will update soon.

[whcirobotics]

The link ^ doesnt work..

[Chris is me]

This is a very, very cool idea. Let us know when it gets back up, I wanna play.

[Josh Fox]

I have a friend who did something similar with the basement of his house. You can turn off the lights, move a robot arm, and several other things through the internet.

I wanna play too!

[demosthenes2k8]

There is no possible way this could go wrong in the hands of someone with poor driving skills.

Me next!

[BornaE]

Just improved to framerate from about 2 frames per second to ~15
The plan for now is to create an admin piece of is to create an admin piece of software that can override the users commands.

Then make it available to public at some times when someone can supervise the robot.

[its da PAT!!!]

I got the chance to drive it a little, and man was it hard! The Lag from video to actual moment was pretty great and it was not hard to run into things.

One thing I thought was pretty cool was the little arm you had on the front of the robot, to move the ramp down to go up it. Now that was pretty cool!

All in all, it was fun and I would love to drive it again. Plus it could be a BIG hit for people that are bored and looking for something to online.

[kgzak]

I wanna drive!

I wonder if we could do this with our FRC robot. Just have to make sure we don't put holes in the walls or anything

[Frank Neuperger]

Link to drive will not always be public. Too risky in terms of stall,burnout and damage to bot and its environment to leave it running. You can however watch on ustream and see team members driving via the web.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/live-robot

From time to time we will make it available for driving by the public. The link will be posted in the ustream chat.

You can also look at the status of the Samantha system eg. batery voltages for the NXT as well as the main 12V battery... IP address of who is in control of the bot and a bunch of other stuff here.

Will post this address after we evaluate the security/damage risk.

On board video will be the next step.

FYI: ustream is delayed by 3+ seconds and is almost useless for control unless you are thinking hybrid mode like FRC 2008.

The video latency and frame rate on the driving applet was just improved by moving from grabbing individual jpegs to streaming motion jpeg. The camera is and axis207W. Very similar to the AXIS cam used for FRC.

THANKS

Thanks to John Toebes (creator of the FTC Samantha wireless control system) for providing the challenge of doing this... as well as providing information on protocol. So far we are really happy with the SAmantha system. We are FTC Rookies and the Samantha is apparently well received by other teams who suffered difficulties with the previous Bluetooth system.

HOW WE DID THIS

We had been thinking about this for a couple years now in terms of a web app for the general public. We had actually driven the FRC bot via wireless using the camera during the 2009 controls system beta test in partnership with team 842. It was basically the very first thing we did when we got the 2008 bot driving with the cRio. We never did get it running on the web though.

Then last Wed.on the Samantha Conference call with John Toebes I asked about getting access to the protocol for this purpose and John mentioned that some teams had talked about doing this but nothing had been accomplished yet. He agreed to provide some info on protocol. To keep it simple, we did not want to do a custom app on the bot but rather just have our over the WEB control system masquerade as an FCS.

I was not however able to contact John until Friday night but we (mostly Borna) started coding the Java applet Thursday night. On Saturday, using Wireshark we sniffed out the essence of the protocol in an hour and got that going (Borna remotely via screen sharing on skype) but could not sort out the initialization (related to the pairing process) that is used as part of the "security" to prevent unauthorized IP address form controlling the Samantha. FYI, the Samantha is WiFi. After a discussion with John on Saturday, he agreed to cut a version of the Samantha code that could be initialized in a mode that does not use the pairing and this allowed the Java applet that we had developed to run with almost no modification. We were driving over the WEB by midnight Saturday. Then we embedded the video into the JAva applet to make it even cleaner. Borna and Austin have been tweaking and polishing it since then.

One of the more difficult things was figuring out how to do a security certificate for the Java app so that it will run over the WEB. No problem developing on a LAN but as soon as the browser sees that it is on the open WEB, security precautions go up by some 30 dB.

We will get a writeup on either the Team 39 and/or the Team0x27 (NURC) web site.

Regards
Frank
Mentor
FRC Team 39
FTC 4314
NURC 0x27

[davidthefat]

Its down, but how can you regulate how many people control it at one time? Do you even regulate that? What if we run over important stuff, or ram into the wall several time?

[Frank Neuperger]

The applet that runs on your PC to give you the viewing window and the control buttons is part of the process of preventing additional connect requests to the bot if someone is already connected. The java applet on your machine checks the Samantha using http: (port 80) to see if anyone is connected to the Samantha already. This is the same status html page that has the battery voltages etc. If no one is connected yet, the applet on your browser continues and connects you to the robot. There may be a possible race condition in terms of second user attempting to connect but the ultimate back up mechanism that prevents more than one connection from being accepted is that the Samantha only allows one TCP connection on the control port (not the status port) anyway.

Will eventually do some sort of driver queuing system but it needs a server somewhere to act as the central memory keeping track of requests.... checking the blacklist etc. Probably one of the PC's here with the bot.

An update in the next couple days will put status info like battery voltage and current drivers IP address on the applet for people to watch as they are waiting to drive. It updates at ~ 1 Hz.

One of our hopes in doing this is that FRC or FTC will consider a Tele-present mode in addition to Autonomous and Tele-operated modes.

Regards
Frank
FTC 4314
FRC 39
NURC 0x27