Hello,
I’m working on the Neurorobotics Platform and we’re starting to work on a Jupyter Notebook Python based alternate interface for our graphical collab app.
We’ve had some initial success interfacing with the existing REST services for OIDC -> our own running on backend servers (hosted on server VMs like .os.bbp.epfl.ch), but we’re reaching the point where we kind of need to interact with ROS (http://www.ros.org/about-ros/) services running on the remote backends and it would give the users a bit more flexibility and experiment power than the graphical frontend.
Unfortunately, ROS (like Nest) does not provide a standalone Python interface. You need to install the entire ROS C++ stack and packages on the backend for the rospy package to be accessible. For the graphical frontend, we’re able to use the pure JavaScript websocket based library, but that’s not really an option for the Jupyter Notebook setup (or at least not a pleasant option). We currently build and deploy RHEL modules for our backends/cluster nodes to load, is it possible to provide ROS as a pre-installed option similar to Nest?
I still need to investigate if it’s possible for us to reach the backend on the specific ROS port, so there’s other stuff to consider, but please let me know if there’s a reason it would be completely impossible on the Jupyter Notebook end.
Thanks In Advance,
Kenny