A lightweight package for providing and consuming ROS services, actions, and topics as RESTful web services
Well look - that's the long term vision, I know now that we will not get that done in even multiple semesters but we will learn and teach a lot as we strive for it :)
(see the caveats below the vision)
how do you do elevators?
so now elevators have a REST api???
just contact hte manufacturer in your building ;)
or you can see the elevator as just another kind of robot :)
so what's your guess: will your library work for me on ROS kinetic, Ubuntu 16.04 on a Pi or am I in for a nightmare of configuration problems?
Becuse of that very troublesome python/ROS integration it can be quite challenging, and understanding why is not simple...
But it s working for us here.
I m working to make it simple and package everything properly, hopefully in the next few weeks, if I dont get derailed doing something else...
In general I think the software level needed for doing robotics is much higher than what people usually... so the goal of robotic platform writer should be to make things simpler. but ROS sadly fails at that, making everything distributed and asynchronous makes everything so much more random and unpredictible.
If I understand correctly your summary for Robot API, you want the students write the web server that connects to ROS ?
with the company I m currently in, because we need highlevel interaction wiht the robot and we coudlnt find anything already there... But my contract run out soon, so I ll need to find other means to keep working on that...
So explain your suggested architecture a little more: Flask running as a separate linux process, accepting HTTP requests, and then creating XMLRPC calls into the service which is running "inside" ROS?
by the way where are you located? I am in Boston, USA
Currently in Seoul SK
(by the way my email is pitosalas@brandeis.edu)