ROS Glass Tools is a project started in the innovation lab of the University of Nebraska with the aim to interface the Google Glass with any robot based on the Robot Operating System (ROS). The ‘ros_glass_tools’ package provides a ‘rosbridge_suite’ interface to communicate with ROS and open the gates for voice control, monitoring, or background alerts for robots powered by Robot Operating System.
The ‘Project Glass’ is an augmented reality project with the mission to produce wearable computers able to display information and communicate through the Internet using natural language voice commands. In 2013, the first wearable device was released under the name of Google Glass, and since then many hobbyists and scientists develop a wide range of applications for entertainment or for daily usage at the office or at home.
The ‘ros_glass_tools’ package can be used to monitor and control almost any robot systems using only the heads up display of the Google Glass and voice commands. The ROS package demonstrates the ability of bidirectional communication between the robot based on ROS and Google Glassware.
Tools
In the first version of the ‘ros_glass_tools’ package are available three sample applications to perform several interactions with a ROS robot using the Google Glass. The three applications allow you to select and display several message data, provide alerts using pop-up warning messages, and control the robot using voice commands.
GlassTopicViewer
GlassTopicViewer is the first application engineered to allow users to monitor several ROS topics and display information such as messages in text or graphic format in the heads-up display on the Google Glass. Depending on the topic selected when the application is opened, on the Google Glass Timeline is displayed a live card where all the information related to that topic are displayed graphically or textually.
GlassROSMonitor
The ‘ros_glass_tools’ package is able to run services in the background, an intelligent approach to allow the user to focus their attention in other tasks. The GlassROSMonitor is designed to display a warning message on the optical head-mounted display (OHMD) only if one of the conditions defined in the glass_monitor.py is violated.
RobotVoiceControl
This application allows users to control one or more robots using simple voice commands features such as “all”, “robot n”, or “execute”. The RobotVoiceControl application sends commands directly to the ROS voice_control.py script for processing and execution. The commands can be customized to control any robotic system powered by ROS.
Example
The ‘ros_glass_tools’ package can be started either using simple voice command such as “ok glass robot control” or navigating into the menu and start the application. Once started the user has to enter an input in the application using one of the three applications available: GlassTopicViewer, GlassROSMonitor, or RobotVoiceControl.
In this movie can be seen how the Google Glass and the ros_glass_tools package works to command and monitor one and then four quadcopters. All these drones run ROS and can be seen how are displayed in real-time on the Google Glass all the information for monitoring, control, and warnings from the drones.
