Creating a GUI for ROS

Question

Hello,

I am a high school student working on a project to submit to an affiliate competition of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. I am trying to create a graphic user interface for ROS to make it even easier for hobbyists and schools to start working on robotics. I am testing it on a turtlebot. Essentially, it will allow you an area to download libraries as well as control the robot. I want to know how you guys think I should go about this. Is there a way to have a 'click' on the screen translate into a written command for the terminal? Thanks for any help you can give!

-Parker Gibbons

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Originally posted by ParkerGibbons on ROS Answers with karma: 61 on 2011-10-23

Post score: 5

Answer 1

Almost all ros command line capabilities are available in ros python APIs like roslib, rospy, rosparam, rosnode, etc. So a good start point could be wxwidget for python.

If you don't want to use the python APIs you can invoke processes through the python os.system method or te subproccess library.

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Originally posted by Pablo Iñigo Blasco with karma: 2982 on 2011-10-23

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 2

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Original comments

Comment by Arkapravo on 2011-11-05:
@Pablo Iñigo Blasco : Fully agree with you, I would have started with wx python or probably pygame

Comment by AHornung on 2011-10-25:
I would suggest using Qt instead (there's also PyQt). It has a nicer API and afaik most wx code in ROS is being ported to Qt (or at least it is planned to).

Comment by LiMuBei on 2011-10-24:
I second this, since wxWidgets is already in ROS (C++ at least), so less dependencies. Also, I like wxWidgets :)

Answer 2

You could also use either Qt (C++), GTK+ in C, or GTKmm (a C++ port for GTK+). There are examples of using Qt in the eros stack here. There's also a good example of using GTK+ with ROS here. Personally, I have used GTKmm for my GUI development in ROS.

Additionally, there is a GTK+ port for Python here.

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Originally posted by DimitriProsser with karma: 11163 on 2011-10-24

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1

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Original comments

Comment by Daniel Stonier on 2011-11-05:
The qt roscreate templates have been spun off from eros into their own stack - qt_ros. They set up a c++ qt-ros package...might be nice to have them also do pyqt packages as well.

Answer 3

There is a "handoff" ticket for porting rxplot to Qt, I think this could also be a good starting point to get into ROS GUI development: https://code.ros.org/trac/ros/ticket/3220

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Originally posted by AHornung with karma: 5904 on 2011-10-25

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Post score: 2

Answer 4

Hi, I don't know if you are still interested in programming a gui. If so, maybe we can share experiences. For my thesis I create a Graphical launchfile-editor, which is growing to a development environment. The project is written in C++ and Qt and and is not yet officially released. Visit http://code.google.com/p/rxdeveloper-ros-pkg/ for more information.

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Originally posted by Filip with karma: 41 on 2011-11-24

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1

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Original comments

Comment by Filip on 2011-11-24:
@tfoote, I will announce it soon, but I need to create a video tutorial first. I guess it's better to present a more complete project. Stay tuned ;)

Comment by tfoote on 2011-11-24:
@Filip, I expect there's several people who would be interested in your project. I suggest that you announce it on the ros-users mailing list and ask if others are interested in joining your development effort.