Development of ROS-based GUI for control of an autonomous surface vehicle

Abstract

Robot Operating System (ROS) and Qt are both powerful tools used in the field of robotics and Graphical User Interface (GUI) development. The combination of both these tools gives an advantage of creating a simple and easy to use yet powerful GUI for control of robots and autonomous vehicles. This paper introduces a simple tab based UI for control of the WAM-V (Wave Adaptive Modular Vehicle) Autonomous Surface Vehicle. The UI is aimed to allow for easy initialization and killing of processes as well as gather and view the vehicular data such as diagnostics, sensor information and live camera feed, all at one place. All communication and data transfer is done wirelessly over a local WiFi network. Manual control of the ASV can be done using the buttons or by specific commands entered via command line as arguments.