Opening websockets to robots across different networks

[Nick Sweet]

Hi all,

I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions for opening websockets to robots at arbitrary locations (but have internet connection). 

Say I have clients on Network A loading a website provided by a server hosted on Amazon EC2. Using roslibjs, the clients attempt to open websockets to robots on Network B, but the websocket URL to connect to rosbridge (e.g. `ws://robot_1.local:9090`) is ill-defined because the robots don't have a public IP. 

What's the best way to set up communication between the robots and clients across arbitrary networks? I was thinking of setting up port forwarding through the EC2 instance (e.g. `ws://STATIC_HOST:9091` for robot 1, `ws://STATIC_HOST:9092` for robot 2...), but that seems a inelegant since I have to set up dedicated port forwarding for each robot. Nevertheless, I've been looking into websocket tunnel tools, but there's a bunch out there and none of them have worked for me yet. Does anyone have a clean solution they could recommend?

Thanks!

Nick

[Jihoon Lee]

Hi Nick,

There is no out-of-box solution that connects a robot at an arbitrary location as far as I know. The easiest way of connecting robots in the other network would be either VPN or port forwarding as you described.

You can also try to implement like a "Robot Portal" in AWS where robots and users can meet and exchange. To do this, you need to implement something like rosbridge_client. This can be an option too. It may require some implementation effort, but it shouldn't be too hard to do.

Cheers,

Jihoon

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[Chad Jenkins]

STUN might also provide another option:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN

-Chad

[Nick Sweet]

Thanks for the responses! I'll post a detailed solution once I have things worked out.

On Thursday, 13 July 2017 09:02:27 UTC-5, Chad Jenkins wrote:

STUN might also provide another option:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN

-Chad

On Jul 13, 2017 3:43 AM, "Jihoon Lee" <jihoon...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Nick,

There is no out-of-box solution that connects a robot at an arbitrary location as far as I know. The easiest way of connecting robots in the other network would be either VPN or port forwarding as you described.

You can also try to implement like a "Robot Portal" in AWS where robots and users can meet and exchange. To do this, you need to implement something like rosbridge_client. This can be an option too. It may require some implementation effort, but it shouldn't be too hard to do.

Cheers,

Jihoon

On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 9:20 PM, Nick Sweet <nck...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions for opening websockets to robots at arbitrary locations (but have internet connection). 

Say I have clients on Network A loading a website provided by a server hosted on Amazon EC2. Using roslibjs, the clients attempt to open websockets to robots on Network B, but the websocket URL to connect to rosbridge (e.g. `ws://robot_1.local:9090`) is ill-defined because the robots don't have a public IP. 

What's the best way to set up communication between the robots and clients across arbitrary networks? I was thinking of setting up port forwarding through the EC2 instance (e.g. `ws://STATIC_HOST:9091` for robot 1, `ws://STATIC_HOST:9092` for robot 2...), but that seems a inelegant since I have to set up dedicated port forwarding for each robot. Nevertheless, I've been looking into websocket tunnel tools, but there's a bunch out there and none of them have worked for me yet. Does anyone have a clean solution they could recommend?

Thanks!

Nick

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