ROS-Mobile: An Android application for the Robot Operating System

Abstract: Controlling and monitoring complex autonomous and semi autonomous robotic systems is a challenging task. The Robot Operating System (ROS) was developed to act as a robotic middleware system running on Ubuntu Linux which allows, amongst others, hardware abstraction, message-passing between individual processes and package management. However, active support of ROS applications for mobile devices, such as smarthphones or tablets, are missing. We developed a ROS application for Android, which comes with an intuitive user interface for controlling and monitoring robotic systems. Our open source contribution can be used in a large variety of tasks and with many different kinds of robots. Moreover, it can easily be customized and new features added. In this paper, we give an outline over the software architecture, the main functionalities and show some possible use-cases on different mobile robotic systems.