robot web tools - hosting page in AWS

Question

Hey All, I'm trying to connect my robot to the web for easier user interface. I found the very helpful libraries in www.robotwebtools.org, where I used the NAV2DJS widget to connect my turtlebot, move_base server and map server to a browser.

I went further and put the html file in an Amazon Web Server Ubuntu machine under /var/www/html/project_name, thinking that I could now access the webpage from any device, no matter which network they are on. The caveat I'm coming across is that I can only interact with the map on machines that are on the same LAN where roscore is running. I'm no web programmer by any means and my hunch is that the websockets aren't moving across different networks, only among the same network.

Question, how can I run the NAV2DJS widget in AWS and control the robot from different machines on any network?

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Originally posted by j_salfity on ROS Answers with karma: 16 on 2017-03-10

Post score: 0

Answer 1

You'll need to make sure that the machine that is running rosbridge_server -- and probably the TF2 web publisher as well -- is accessible from outside your own network.

Depending on your local network setup that might mean that you'll have to open up some ports in your firewall (9090 for starters if you used the defaults) and / or will need to forward them in your NAT device (typically a consumer router).

After that is done edit your HTML file to make sure that clients will try to connect to a public IP where those ports are reachable. If you have a cable internet or ADSL connection, that would most likely be the public IP address of your home router.

Note that this is not really a ROS problem: any time you'd want to make a resource available to hosts outside your own network you'd have to follow similar procedures.

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Originally posted by gvdhoorn with karma: 86574 on 2017-03-11

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1