Give your robot knowledge of the wider world

Overview

The iot_bridge package provides a bridge between ROS (Robot Operating System) and smart device management systems. As of June 2017, the package provides bridging with openHAB, one of the most actively developed and used framework for home automation.

  • ROS is an extremely powerful open source set of libraries and tools that help you build robot applications - providing drivers and state-of-the-art algorithms for vision, movement, etc. See the official website ros.org for more info.
  • openHAB is an open source system that connects to virtually any intelligent device, such as smoke detectors, motion detectors, temperature sensors, Amazon Alexa, security systems, TV/audio, Chromecast, fingerprint scanners, lighting, 1-Wire, Wemo, CUPS, DMX, KNX, openpaths, Bluetooth, MQTT, Z-Wave, telephony, Insteon, weather sensors, and web services such as Twitter, etc. openHAB also provides a basic Web GUI and iPhone / Android app for setting and dynamically viewing values. See the official website openhab.org/features for more info.

Combine the two and you have an incredibly powerful system.

Use Cases

  • A motion detector in openHAB triggers and ROS dispatches the robot to the location to provide a video feed.
  • ROS facial recognition recognizes a face at the door and openHAB unlocks the door.
  • A Washing Machine indicates to openHAB that the load is complete and ROS dispatches a robot to move the laundry to the dryer.
  • A user gives a voice smart home command to Alexa. Using the openHAB/Amazon Alexa integration this is forwarded to ROS via the iot_bridge.
  • openHAB MQTT binding indicates that Sarah is approaching home and an openHAB sensor indicates that the temperature is hot. ROS dispatches the robot to bring Sarah’s favorite beer. openHAB turns on her favorite rock music and lowers the house temperature.
  • A user clicks on the openHAB GUI on an IPAD and selects a new room location for the robot. The message is forwarded by the iot_bridge to ROS and ROS dispatches the robot.

With the iot_bridge, any openHAB device (essentially any IoT device) can be easily setup to publish updates to the iot_updates topic in ROS, giving a ROS robot knowledge of any Home Automation device. ROS can publish to the openhab_set topic (or openhab_command) and the device in openHAB will be set to the new value (or act on the specified command).

System Design

iot_bridge provides a server that bridges between ROS network and IoT network. The server listens to the 1) status update, or the result of the commands from IoT world 2) commands that robots in the ROS network want to send to IoT network. Robots operate and get information from the bridge via ROS Topic.

Usage

Run the bridge server.

roslaunch iot_bridge iot_bridge.launch

With the server running, a few topics become available:

/iot_command
/iot_set
/iot_updates

Listen to the update from IoT network

rostopic echo iot_command

TBD format of the topic

Send commands to IoT network

TBD

Release History

See changelogs per distro:

Note: upon v0.8, package was renamed openhab_bridge to iot_bridge. The ROS topic names changed from openhab_* to iot_* accordingly.

EoF