nova violet
Alpha release of robotjs.org available at demo.robotjs.org. Beta development screenshots attached, Working on getting all 300-400 standard URDF robot models in.
The Google docs-esque asynchronous sqllite database is powered by SQLSync and CloudFlare. Next steps after getting the robot models in is implementing async OPC-UA client, and physics.
Interested in any feedback the Poimandres community has, because demo.robotjs.org uses @react-three/fiber and @react-three/drei, and more. 🙂
eager marsh
Very cool work! What is the grander vision? Is the idea to use OPC-UA to program your robots with primitive you define, while physics and control run in the browser?
nova violet
Very cool work! What is the grander vision? Is the idea to use OPC-UA to program...
The grander vision with OPC-UA is to have a robot control interface that mimics the physical robot in real-time, so that robot programming can be contained on the physical robot and UX/UI contained within a web browser. It's meant to be super intuitive and not requite any download, install, newsletter, or video tutorial; just click and go.
OPC-UA is probably the most widespread communication protocol for robotics, so that's why I am targeting that after the 300-400 additional URDF robot models. Ultimately, it would be best to let users decide how to seperate their logic between the physical robot and the web browser UI.
I'm not sure how physics is going to play into it yet, however it would be really useful to be able to program robots and simulate them in browser.
Still understanding what the minimum number of features for open source release will be (Alpha released, currently in Beta development, then v1 will be open.)
eager marsh
Cool! For what target audience are you building this? Education, Academia or industry?
Coming from the industrie/academic side in robotics, I found that many groups are very particular about the physics stack. They are even more opinionated when it comes to the control stack. So frameworks like drake.mit.edu have been using https://github.com/meshcat-dev/meshcat (a three.js wrapper) for visualization exclusively. It's used both for simulation and hardware since it's only setting geometries/poses via websockets while the controls/physics live somewhere else.
nova violet
Cool! For what target audience are you building this? Education, Academia or ind...
Education. I did not make most of the technologies used by RobotJS. I am doing the minimum amount of work to create what I think RobotJS "should" be. Then I will open source it.
I am very interested in trying out mechcat to learn more about it, but cannot find a simple way to click around whatever it is. I will bookmark it for later, and sleep on it!
There's also foxglove, which is more industry-focused than robotjs.org: https://app.foxglove.dev/
nova violet
I really appreciate the dialoague! Decided to remove physics from the V1 OSS release. There's so many existing physics solutions, and it is not my expertise!