The advent of ROS, the Robot Operating System, has finally made it possible to implement and use state-of-the-art navigation and manipulation algorithms on widely-available, inexpensive standard robot platforms. With the addition of the Rosbridge application programming interface, interface designers and applications programmers can create robot interfaces and behaviors without venturing into the specialized world of robotics engineers. This tutorial introduces ROS and Rosbridge, and shows how quickly and easily these tools can be used to design and conduct large-scale online HRI experiments, access algorithms for autonomous robot behavior, and leverage the huge ecosystem of general-purpose web-based and application-oriented software engineering for robotics and HRI research. Tutorial attendees will learn the basics of autonomous and teleoperated navigation and manipulation, as well as interface design for online interaction with robots. During the tutorial they will design and write their own remote presence application, as well as develop strategies for incorporating autonomy and dealing with data collection.

In this paper, we describe a remote lab system that allows remote groups to access a shared PR2. This lab will enable a larger and more diverse group of researchers to participate directly in state-of-the-art robotics research and will improve the reproducibility and comparability of robotics experiments. We identify a set of requirements that apply to all web-based remote laboratories and focus on solutions to these requirements. Specifically, we present solutions to interface, control and design difficulties in the client and server-side software when implementing a remote laboratory architecture. The combination of shared physical hardware and shared middleware software allows for experiments that build upon and compare against results on the same platform and in the same environment for common tasks. We describe how researchers can interact with the PR2 and its environment remotely through a web interface, as well as develop similar interfaces to visualize and run experiments remotely.

We present a study of using a robotic learning from demonstration system capable of collecting large amounts of human-robot interaction data through a web-based interface. We examine the effect of different perceptual mappings between the human teacher and robot on the learning from demonstration. We show that humans are significantly more effective at teaching a robot to navigate a maze when presented with information that is limited to the robot's perception of the world, even though their task performance measurably suffers when contrasted with users provided with a natural and detailed raw video feed. Robots trained on such demonstrations learn more quickly, perform more accurately and generalize better. We also demonstrate a set of software tools for enabling internet-mediated human-robot interaction and gathering the large datasets that such crowdsourcing makes possible.

We describe our efforts to create infrastructure to enable web interfaces for robotics. Such interfaces will enable researchers and users to remotely access robots through the internet as well as expand the types of robotic applications available to users with web-enabled devices. This paper centers on rosjs, a lightweight Javascript binding for ROS, Willow Garage's robot middleware framework, rosjs exposes many of the capabilities of ROS, allowing application developers to write controllers that are executed through a web browser. We discuss how rosjs extends ROS and briefly overview some of the features it provides, rosjs has been instrumental in the creation of remote laboratories featuring the iRobot Create and the PR2. These facilities will be available to the community as experimental resources. We describe the overall goals of this project as well as provide a brief description of how rosjs was used to help create web interfaces for these facilities.