WebRTC Data Channels for unreliable data streams

[Andrew Blakey]

Hi all:

I was thinking about a problem I've had for years and how it might be overcome with WebRTC Data Channels. In short, WebRTC Data Channels are pretty new, somewhat complicated, but offer a way to finally have unreliable data in the browser. This would be good for robot data that is better received never than late (eg. robot position data). I want to overcome the frustration of an ever-growing backlog of stale WebSocket data when too many clients connect in poor network conditions.

- I've begun experimenting with it and if things continue to work the way I'm anticipating, I'll have a demonstration in the coming week or two. 

- But I also wanted to reach out to the community to see if anyone else has played with or has interest in this concept. 

- Finally, I thought about how it would be nice if it fit in to ros2-web-bridge, but cannot envision a way to accomplish that without significant breakages to the rosbridge2 protocol. I'm still mulling over the idea. Maybe an option to outright upgrade a websocket connection to a webrtc data channel.

Cheers,

Andrew