vtr3_ui

This user interface can but is not meant to run standalone. Include the UI into your projects. For VTR3, follow the installation instructions there. If you just want to get a sense of how it works, follow the installation instructions below, and choose project "None" at start up.

Installation

Commands below assumes you are at the root directory of this repository.

Dependencies

sudo apt install -y nodejs npm protobuf-compiler  # system deps
pip3 install flask flask_socketio eventlet python-socketio python-socketio[client] websocket-client  # python deps

Build the UI

protoc --python_out=`pwd` *.proto  # build protobuf messages (this is optional since we commit the resulting python scripts, run this command after you make any change to the proto files)
cd vtr-ui && npm install . && npm run build  # install dependencies and then "compile" javascripts

Launch

In one terminal,

python3 web_server.py  # web server that hosts the web page and handle some requests from the frontend

In another terminal,

python3 socket_server.py  # socket io server that passes data between the frontend and other systems, mainly used to send updates from vtr to the frontend

Open your brower and navigate to http://localhost:5200, and select "None" when choosing project.

To Developers

VTR3 user interface is a single page web app tested with Google Chrome and Firefox. The backend server uses python Flask, and the implementation is here. The frontend is written in html, javascript and css, and it mainly uses the following libraries:

• React: A JavaScript library for building user interfaces.
  • Used for designing the entire user interface.
  • We choose this library because it is the most popular one at the moment.
• Leaflet and React-Leaflet: An open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps and its React wrapper.
  • Used for displaying the background map and pose graph.
• Socket.IO: Real-time communication.
  • Used for getting real-time updates from the main VT&R process.
• Protocol Buffers: Language-neutral, platform-neutral extensible mechanism for serializing structured data.
  • Used for serializing graph and robot updates.
• Webpack and Babel: JavaScript bundler and compiler, respectively.
  • Used for transforming and optimizing the frontend code so that we can serve it using our backend.
  • We choose these two packages because they are the default of Create React App, which is used to start our UI development.

Always make sure the packages being used are the latest, upgrade packages to the latest version periodically (npx npm-check-updates -u). See README inside vtr-ui for more information about how to build the frontend. Currently we do not support using the default ES6 server provided by Create React App, so you have to debug UI with VTR running.