BathyBoatWeb

Hydro/Rob Project - Guerlédan 2017/2018 - WebApp
This project aims at providing a web-based monitoring and planning UI for robots. It's designed to be used with BathyBoatNav that interacts with sensors and actuators.

Installation

The web server uses the version v8.9.4 LTS of the NodeJS framework.
NodeJS (alongside npm) can be installed via apt for Debian and Ubuntu based distributions.

Once NodeJS is installed and the repository cloned, open a terminal in the root directory and install all packages:

npm install

You should now be ready to go:

nodejs ./server/app.js

The web server is now running on port 29201, you can test it by accessing the url http://localhost:29201.

Configuration

The web server must be configured with a config.yaml file placed in a Config directory in the parent of the git repository.
The structure is:

/MyProject  
    /BathyBoatWeb  
        ...  
    /Config  
        /config.yaml

The config.yaml file must respect the following layout:

### Required ###
webServer:
    port: 29201
    rosIP: 127.0.0.1
missions:
    path: /home/helios/Helios/Missions/
    name: Mission_{DATE}_{TIME}.json
tcp:
    dataPort: 29200
    commandPort: 22300
    
### Optional ###
map:
    initialPosition:
        lat: 48.395497
        lng: -4.390246
camera: 
    enable: true
    streamPort: 8081
    webSocketPort: 8082
    record:
        enable: true
        path: /home/helios/Helios/Recordings/
        name: Record_{DATE}_{TIME}.ts

Web server

The web server is performing different tasks:

• Dowloading map tiles and keeping them for further session
• Receiving data from a ROS TCP server
• Sending commands to a ROS TCP server
• Sending real-time video stream to the web client via web socket

Video stream

To enable the real-time video stream from a video device you must use ffmpeg to direct the stream to the web server.
For this purpose, the shell script video_capture.sh in the scripts directory provides a working example. However, it's necessary to execute this shell script by using the node package pm2 so that the trigger on the web page work and that the video capture starts whenever a video device is plugged in.
For such a configuration you must install pm2 globally.

npm install -g pm2
cd BathyBoatWeb/Scripts
pm2 start video_capture.sh

See the pm2 documentation for more details.