FIROS

FIROS is a tool that helps connecting robots to the cloud. For this purpose it uses the Robot Operating System (ROS, http://www.ros.org/) and the FIWARE Context Broker (http://catalogue.fiware.org/enablers/publishsubscribe-context-broker-orion-context-broker) as a way to publish and listen robot’s data.

FIROS works as a translator between the robotics field and the cloud world, transforming ROS messages into NGSI to publish them in the cloud, and vice versa.

This project is part of FIWARE.

Installing FIROS

Requirements

• Ubuntu
• Python 2.7 or greater
• Nodejs v0.10 or greater
• ROS Hydro or greater http://wiki.ros.org/es/ROS/Installation

Installation

1. Make sure you have set your working space (http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/InstallingandConfiguringROSEnvironment)
2. Open a Terminal and navigate to the ROS workspace you want to use. If you just followed the ROS environment tutorial, it will be ~/catkin_ws.

cd ~/catkin_ws/src

1. Clone the FIROS git repository into your ROS workspace.

git clone https://github.com/ikergune/firos

1. Build the FIROS package with the following commands. This will create a devel and build folder under your workspace.

cd ~/catkin_ws
catkin_make

1. For convenience, you may wish to source your setup.sh script from your .bashrc so that your environment is ready as soon as you log in. e.g.

echo "source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc

1. Execute “source devel/setup.bash” to allow the current command line instance to use FIROS

FIROS is now installed in your robot!

Important Note: The first time FIROS is launched it will ask you for root permissions to install it’s dependencies

Configuring FIROS

FIROS has several configuration files located at src/firos/config.

config.json

This file contains the configuration related to FIROS launching environment. Here is a description of each parameter:

• environment: These parameters take care of the local, development and production environment configurations by setting up the `context broker’s IP, port and FIROS rest apis’ port. FIROS will use an environment’s configuration based this value, but there can be as many environments as you want.
• server: It contains information related to the FIROS server
  • port: The port in which FIROS is listening. If you want to let access outside of your local network, you might want to redirect that port on your router.
• contextbroker: Contains information related to the Context broker configuration
  • address: Context broker’s IP address
  • port: Context broker’s port
  • subscription: Context broker’s subscription information
    • throttling: The update frequency at which the Context Broker sends updates to the robot.
    • subscription_length: The subscription expiration time
    • subscription_refresh_delay: The subscription refresh rate in days in order to avoid its expiration
• interface: Network configuration of the card in use
  • public: Public IP. Do not forget to redirect the proper ports in your network
  • wlan0, et0, tun0, etc: Different network interface configuration.
• log_level: It represents the verbosity of the logging system for FIROS. Available options are as follows: “NONE”, “INFO”, “DEBUG” ,”WARNING”, “ERROR” and “CRITICAL”

Here is an example of a config.json file for a local environment:

{
  "environment": "local",

  "local": {
    "server": {
        "port": 10100
    },
    "contextbroker": {
        "address"   : "192.168.43.159",
        "port"      : 1026,
        "subscription": {
          "throttling": "PT0S",
          "subscription_length": "P1M",
          "subscription_refresh_delay": 20
        }
    },
    "log_level": "INFO",
    "interface": "public"
  }
}

robotdescriptions.json

File truncated at 100 lines see the full file