ROS-Mobile: An Android application for the Robot Operating System
This addresses the problem of mobile accessibility for ROS users, though it is incremental as it extends existing ROS capabilities to a new platform.
The authors tackled the lack of mobile device support for the Robot Operating System (ROS) by developing an Android application with an intuitive interface for controlling and monitoring robotic systems, making it open-source and customizable for various tasks and robots.
Controlling and monitoring complex autonomous and semi autonomous robotic systems is a challenging task. The Robot Operating System (ROS) was developed to act as a robotic middleware system running on Ubuntu Linux which allows, amongst others, hardware abstraction, message-passing between individual processes and package management. However, active support of ROS applications for mobile devices, such as smarthphones or tablets, are missing. We developed a ROS application for Android, which comes with an intuitive user interface for controlling and monitoring robotic systems. Our open source contribution can be used in a large variety of tasks and with many different kinds of robots. Moreover, it can easily be customized and new features added. In this paper, we give an outline over the software architecture, the main functionalities and show some possible use-cases on different mobile robotic systems.