Conf42 Python 2024 - Online

Implementing a Virtual-Physical Environment Manipulation System based on ROS using Python and Three.js

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Abstract

By leveraging Python+rosbridge and VueJS+Three.js, it becomes straightforward to create a ROS-based Digital Twins system. Through the integration of WebRTC and IP cameras, this system allows the operation and training of physical robotic arms on a cloud-based webpage, with Dockerization deployment.

Summary

  • Ivan: I will introduce the topic implementing a virtual physical environment system based on rust using Python and threejs days Twins was created from my previous company Paia focusing on educational system. Here are tools and skills we use in our project.
  • Three JS is useful APIs and developed by the Webgro specification. We use Figma tool to design our markup. It's really helpful to use generative artificial intelligence. After many steps of the kind of prompt message by generated AI, you get this kind of markup with cyberpunk style.
  • So let's see how we put a scene here in our virtual environment. How far the camera can see is decide by the two clear plans here. Only between the near clear plan and far clear plan objects here we can see and display on our web page. How we achieve the synchronization of virtual and physical.
  • Open source tool is open source and already someone create docker files. We can easy to start this service by WebRTC streamer this GitHub project. In production our main system digital twins and also the web artist tumor API server all deployed on cloud simultaneously.
  • ROS cluster connect virtual and physical environment through Rosebridge library. We use Python language connected with c sharp language to control the physical robotic arm. In the end we use DevOps skills to containerize our applications to make them easy deploy.

Transcript

This transcript was autogenerated. To make changes, submit a PR.
Hello everyone, this is Ivan. I will introduce the topic implementing a virtual physical environment system based on rust using Python and threejs days Twins was created from my previous company Paia focusing on educational system. We aimed to university student to help them using a kind of tool create, manipulate and the chair model in the virtual environment which is synchronized physical one. It's really helpful to decrease the cost in the physical environment. And here we list all agendas that we will talk about later. First of all I will explain why it's us and why is three z. And then we will introduce digital twins concepts. And also we provide a user interface to manipulate digital twins assistance. And also we provide a control panel to the physical robotic arm. And also we use threejs library and byte framework integration in the virtual environment. And also we use WebrtC skill to connect IP camera to display the physical environment in the virtual page. And then we use a connection to ROS cluster by RoS Bridge and it's training in Python language. Also we subscribe it in the front end side by RoS library and also provide RASC cloud API to integrate the systems between physical and virtual environments. And also in the end we provide a conclusion for overall of the topic. I will tell you later, my background is a little complex. Not only focus on programming but I am director as well. Already did some short twins and also I was volunteer some years ago working Central America on the islands near the Caribbean Sea. And also I like cycling, I already cycled many parts of different countries. Sometimes I use in twins kind of stories to encourage my students, especially young generation young engineers to help them figure out what they really want in their future careers. Here are tools and skills we use in our project. First of all is a design tool we use is figma. It's a well known tool, most designers use it usually. And then we use some frameworks. Here one is white and the other one is view framework. Yeah we integrate both in our project and also we use view router and Paia to code our back end API. And also we use tailwind and sauce to style our HTTP pages. And also we choose some skills. Here one is three z to operate the 3d model of robotics on in our virtual environment. Also we use Rosebridge to receive and subscribe messages from the party arm between physical and virtual environment. And also we use WebRTC to connect the IP camera to display the physical robotics on in our virtual page. And also we provide ROS cloud API to update and reiker the status of robotic on. And then we use some others tools like Docker and Jenkins for our continuous integration and deployments. Yeah, it's very helpful for quickly implement deployments in our projects. It's very important skills. Then we can see the architecture here. The left part is the front end side, we will talk about later. And the middle is DevOps or we call CI CD for integration deployment. Then we see under the DevOps with the backend side we use Python combined with Raspbridge and we also have local side. In the right part we use physical robotic arm and IP camera to record the environment to show in our virtual pages. Let's see the demonstration in the lab part we see the robotic arm in the virtual environment and see how it works. And also in the middle part we see there are many control gears here. And its button has information of the access angles and positions. So we can control each one assessed by each button. On the top right display we saw the physical robotic in the IP cameras. You see that it's synchronized in the virtual one layer under the display. There are some action scripts here recorded each steps. You control the gears in the middle, so you can record each action and repeat it many times. Beside action scripts we see some message here. Those messages is to tell user about how the robots, how the system works well, or if it has errors. It will show some message here to alert people now have some problems here. Okay, let's explain why is ROS. And ROS is full name is Lobar operating system. It's not really operating system. It must be installed on main leveraging system like Windows or Linux. So it's similar like a kind of framework to control and map device of robotic well. Also it provide some modular criteria, like stacks, packages and nodes. So an order can contain many packages. And it's the basic unit of the robotic operating system. Also a stack can contain many packages well. But a stack is more similar like a collation of packages. So for example, when you use anaconda in Python language, you use command to install Jupyter notebook or tensorflow. And after you execute the command line conduct, install, it will install not just one package and many packages will be installed. It's a kind of stacks of those packages provided twins kind of function to help user can easily install their service and functions well. And also it provide communication mechanism between Rasnode. It must contain topic, service action leap topics is similar like a channel. Then right. Each node can subscribe and listen the same topic. And then they will get the message only by those node they have subscribed this topic. And also it provide a kind of service. So a service is a kind of function to provide Rasnow to block current process, to excuse others actions provided by action Lib. So many actions lib, they combine together to provide different kind of actions for a service. And each action is blocking processor will be executed in the background of operation system. Okay, so let's talk about threejs. Three JS is useful APIs and developed by the Webgro specification. And also it is collapsed either and simplified well, so user can easily use it on their 3d environment from inside. So let's see from inside, we use the Figma tool to design our markup, right? So you can see how we decide markup through Figma and artificial intelligence as well for generated automatically by prompt message. As you see in the center of picture, we put a lot of keywords in the prompt box. Yeah. After we kill the random button, we can see this kind of picture to help us design our markup. Well, to decide our main idea and things, to decide our main color. Well, it's really helpful to use generative artificial intelligence. Yeah. After many steps of the kind of prompt message by generated AI, after many times execute the generated AI, you finally get this kind of markup with cyberpunk style. Yeah, I list many keywords in the left side of this page. You can see here, Neil, lab backgrounds are high contrast and metal and cool color manned styles in cyberpunk. So yeah, it's a cyberpunk style markup. You see the whole mug out here. So three parts of the user interface as well. You can see I already using box to separate three parts. In the green box here, we see it's an information displayer. So it contains virtual 3d robotics on here, and physical iv camera here, coordinated axis here. And the arrow master here. Inside the information display, it have a small part of control panel here. You see the red box, the red box show the reset button here. And the six access angle control gear here. And the motor movement speed here. Okay. And action recordings are added here. Action recording here, the last part of the sidebar in the orange box. In the orange box here, it shows logo and the device, lister. Yeah, we can aid the device or edit snan as well. And the user login here, we continue to show the physical robotic arm here. So here we see the physical robotic arm with this axis and control. So you see many pictures here, different angle to see the physical robotic arm. Yeah, it's bigger ones almost is higher to health of adult bodies. So each access to see each picture and overall has six axis in this robotic arm. The skill we use in virtual environment threejs. So in the three zs fundamentals we see layer some components here. One is scene, scene is virtual 3d stage where can use cameras, objects, light resource and all models we can present here. And the second one is camera is determined the position and perspective and projection of the display. The next one is objects like we see in the right side of pictures. The virtual robot is on. We put these kind of objects in the virtual environment. So it contains many operations such as rotation, scaling, translations on one object like cubes, severes and models. And the next one is light. So light is the brightness and shadow effect of objects are determined by the position of light sources such as lights and direction lights and spotlight as well. So you can see the light pictures. We put the directional light on the top to brighten the robotic on to make its models show the brightness and shadow effects on its model. And last one is renderer is to convert 3d objects and lighting information into two dimension. So yeah, actually we see the older 3d environments on website page is in two dimension. Ultimately we should convert all the 3d objects, include the light information into two dimension. Like transform the images on the screen by our camera perspective to the sim. So we will expand more details in later sliders. So let's see, first of all, we put a scene here in our virtual environment. Yeah, it's empathy in the sims at the beginning. Okay, let's start to put camera into scene. So in this case we use perspective camera. It contains four parameters. First of all is field of view and aspart ratio and near and far clear pan. Here we see the pictures in the left side there's a camera its direction to the right side. So its angle and the direction decide a field of view here. And how far the camera can see is decide by the two clear plans here. One is a near clear plan. The other one is far clear plan. So only between the near clear plan and far clear plan objects here we can see and display on our web page. Later we will talk more details in later sliders and how we decide. Each plan's size is by the spared ratios here. So we decide Aspar ratios by its width and high decide the size of the clear plan. So the linear clear plan and the far clear plan. Its ratio is the same and only between the two clear plans. Objects here that we can see on our screens later. Okay, so in the nest I will explain is to describe objects between the near clear plan and the far clear plans. So as I mentioned, between the two clear plans, all objects here we can see only on the screen. So here we see there are many blue cubes here. So only those blue cubes cubes we can see on our display and ours, like the purple cubes outside the two clear plans we cannot see on our screen. So you can see, it's very simple to create a cube into the sim by those function here. The first one you use in the bus geometry to create a new geometry object and decide its mesh standard material by its color. Then we put the material and the geometry into the mesh object to create a cube object. Then we can use sim eight to put the cube into the scene. Okay, so let's continue to set a light into our scene so you can see the pictures. We put duration of light on the top of those cubes. Like we mentioned in previous slider, we put light on the top of our robotic arm so the light can make those cubes looks well to obviously see its darkness and shadow. So you see only, it's the sense only the two clip plants objects, we can make the effect of lightness on those objects. So out of the two clips, those purple objects cannot be affected by the light. Then we use the rendered function to display the scenes into the screen. Like you see, only the blue cubes here will display the on the screens outside cleaver plans. Those purple cubes won't be rendered on the screens. So, yeah, it's the rendered functions you will use in the final stage also. Yeah. If we want to make the purple cube into the scenes, we just backwards a little. The near Korea plants measure one purple cube into the scope of the two Korea plants. Like you see now, purple cubes already in front of those blue cubes. And behind, finally, you will see the purple is very close to the front of the camera. And behind purple cubes, they are all blue cubes. So, yeah, it's the perspective from the camera. And then we continue to see how we integrate a robotic arm in the virtual environment. With the physical robotic arm here, we create a model, contains six access here on the buttons. There's one base here. So it's very simple architecture. So we can easy to build up in the virtual environment and synchronize each access to the physical one. Finally, you can see you can control the virtual robotic arms. Very easy to synchronize the physical one. Okay, so how we achieve the synchronization of virtual and physical. So you see, we have some steps here in the left side. On the right side, you see. Yeah, it's a demonstration we see before the CIS control and ancient execution. Then we combine it to change six Asians angles so those angles data will deliver to both virtual and the physical robotic arms. Yeah, so you can see it's automatically synchronized virtual and physical at the same time. Okay. It's based on the robot operating system message format. So they are both in the ROS cluster so they can easily get this message. And we maintain those messages and data into the cloud by the ROS cloud API. Let's continue to see another skio web RTC we use for the IP camera information sent to the web page. So you see the web RTC by the IP cameras. By this hardware we use a TP link table we buy it's cheaper and we're easy to use in our country. So it's very simple. We're using it's by the RTSP protocol. It's a general protocol. We set the username and password and the IP address is a public IP address. Later I will tell you how we get the public IP address. This kind tool is open source and already someone create docker files. We can easy to start this service by WebRTC streamer this GitHub project. Yeah it support RTSP protocol and also can start HTTP server. You can easy to connect this server by another server as well and compatible with Windows and inas. Actually it's a docker image easy to use in a containerized. So you see yeah it's very simple to use. We don't need to modify too much then we can use it well okay let's see the programming code of WebRTC how to use it in our project. So there are two IP addresses we need to set up. One is camera IP address. It's RTSP protocol to public for outside services and the otherwise RTC IP address is local address for our service to connect to the physical IP camera. When the components start up we need a WebRTC streamer to start a server in our local environment and then we use the connect function to public the RTSP protocol to outside service when we use WebRTC we encounter some issues here. Yeah because a little different the usage of WebRTC streamer in development and production. In development stage we run the WebRTC streamer locally so we don't care about the public IP address but in production our main system digital twins and also the web artist tumor API server all deployed on cloud simultaneously. So we choose the docker compose to solve twins issue to make land run at the same time. Then we still encounter website appearing back during the development. Finally we found we must change UDB protocol to TCP protocol for our connection between the IP camera and the WebRTC server. In the next stage we master to public our IP address. So our IP camera without the external IP. So finally we choose the poor forwarding. To solve this question you can see we use common Socat in Linus we threw the UDP, that's why we use UDP can work as well to inside service of our IP camera and web update servers to public from the outside computer through the public IP address. So it means other service can connect this web party service through the public IP address. Okay, let's continue to talk about the front end side analog View framework to subscribe ROS bridge to listen the ROS messages in the front end side. Okay, so let's talk about how ROS cluster connect virtual and physical environment through Rosebridge library. So ROS library defines a topic each node and then ROS node can deliver a message through the topic to each other from inside using the subscribe function to subscribe this topic to get the message and three s components will change their angle and position depends on those messages delivered from the last cluster. So you can see we get a lot of messages in the console log. So in the backend side of Python language also we need subscriber to the topic in the last cluster. So we see how the backend side we subscribe it. We use create subscription here to the send topic. Both the send on the front end side and the back inside. So the listener callback we see when we get the message from the loss cluster we send those messages into the cloud ROS API. We save all the information and data into cloud database and also we send those information by different angles and position to the robotic arm. Later we will tell more details about how we use the Python language connected with c sharp language to control the physical robotic arm. And so in the background side of Python language we also define Roscow API. So first of all it's a category device. So user can use this device API to register a new device when they have a new device into the ROS cluster. Also they can depend on their password and username to deliver the right certificate to the right device to make sure they can control or manipulate each ROS node in ROS cluster so they can do some actions by the ROS API to synchronize virtual and physical environment devices. So we continue to introduce ROS cloud API. Here we show how we interact with get method of device API. It will respond to JSON object to show the device IP, name brand and others attributes. You see how we put JSON object into our device asian API asian we define move and then we put some data like angle speed for each access and we execute the API. The physical and virtual robotic arm will follow those information to change the right angle and speed. Here we see how Python code the rascal API. We use the function compared to angle lister to make sure the current angle they want to change is totally different than previous one and if it's did we will code the API instantly. So here the second part we see the device asian page function we mentioned in previous slide. We put the asian move and put some data angle here to synchronize both virtual and physical robotic arm at the same time. Here we get the last message from the Python websocket into the C sharp library. To control the physical robotic arm we use C sharp SDK to encapsulate those functions to control the physical device like we can change each access and also we can set its angles and position speed as well by those functions. In the end we use DevOps skills, something tools like Jenkins and Docker containerize our applications to make them easy deploy. You see how we use Jenkins and Darkrise tool to deploy both on cloud and on premises at the same time. So you see the script we state by state to execute and then after the image created we put the image into the AWS ECR service. Then later we get the image from that to deploy on AWS environments. So all I want to present to you are already finished here. So let's give you a summary. So in this presentation you get the based concept of ros and threejs as well and also know how we integrate our system into virtual and physical environments and know how we create a cloud based interface to integrate rust cloud API we defined and the local IP webcam. And also you know how we deploy conveniently by the Docker and Jenkins. We dockerize all application and make them easy to deploy by the Jenkins. So I hope you can get some knowledge from my presentation. So if you still have any questions, just yeah, send me message. Thank you.
...

Ivan Chiou

Senior Technical Manager @ PAIA

Ivan Chiou's LinkedIn account



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