Robot Management Cloud Server

About the project

This software solution enables you to control, manage and supervise ROS-based robots. It allows you secure remote access, and is compatible with any third party application protocol, as it offers routing and port mapping independent on the payload or type of packet.

The possible usage of this software is very wide, ranging from home use, while making a single robot accessible from network, to remote lab management, where you can control robots in the lab, deploy software on them, connect through SSH and all of that from the comfort of your home. The protocol, which is used for configuration of the routing tables in the reverse proxy server is simple enough to be used in any other application that you might have developed, or might want to, as it is completely independent of the RMS system, which was simply chosen as a tested and rich UI with user authentication.

The project can be found on ROS wiki as well (link).

The whole system consists of several parts:

• OpenVPN network
• RMS (Robot Management System) and it’s extension
• Dispatcher

OpenVPN

Get OpenVPN

The VPN network should be set up first, you can either make your own configuration, or use the one supplied in openvpn_config folder, in user_client, robot_client and server subfolders respectively.

If you are to use your own configuration, keep in mind that client isolation is strongly advised, as well as no routing being set. Since the robots and user clients need to communicate only with the server, adding these options would only cause security risk.

One VPN network should be sufficient, given the client isolation, but two is strongly recommended, so a user cannot create a fake robot connection, which would not cause any security issues, but could cause conflicts in robot identification.

There are tools for OpenVPN configuration and key generation available in the openvpn_config folder. More information is also available in the readme file in that folder.

RMS extension

Get RMS

RMS setup is to be done exactly as described on the RMS webpage, with the addition of copying and overwriting the files in app folder by the ones supplied from this repository (rms_extension/app), after the installation is complete.

Once you complete the installation and copy the required files, you need to navigate to the installation folder and modify file located in RMS_FOLDER/app/config/bootstrap.php You will find a line containing “VPN_SERVER_IP” and change the IP address there to the address of the VPN server, to which user clients will connect.

Also, RMS requires rosbrdige to be installed and running on the side of the robots. How to install and run rosbridge on the robots running ROS is described on the official website.

Dispatcher

Once the VPN and RMS with the extension are set up, you need to configure and run launch_server.py on the server side, and launch_client.py on the side of the robot.

On the client, all you need to do is to edit the address of the server, you will find at the end of the script, simply change the “cloudServerIP” to the IP address of the VPN server for robots.

On the server side, you may want to again navigate to the bottom lines of the script, and modify the listening ports or addresses for server threads, or add another network service by adding another line with the “addTunnel” method.

Details of both server and client configurations for Dispatcher can be found in corresponding launch files.

Docker

The server part of the application is also available as a Docker image, information on running it is available in it’s Docker repository - mjezersky/robotcloudserver.