Tutorial: How to customise the WebCommander displays?#

In this tutorial, we will modify some of the WebCommander screen to add custom displays/functions.

Pre-requisites#

Make sure you have read the The WebCommander tool documentation first!

Example 1: change the camera displayed on a WebCommander tab#

Let’s change the output image that currently displays the Head Front Camera tab to display that of the torso camera.

Enter the robot and edit the following file:

ssh pal@ari-0c

nano /home/pal/.pal/wt/wt_ari_sections.yaml

Change the ROS topic it publishes from:

"4. Head Front Camera":
    type: "Video"
    parameters:
        topic: "/head_front_camera/color/image_raw/compressed"

To:

"4. Head Front Camera":
    type: "Video"
    parameters:
        topic: "/torso_front_camera/color/image_raw/compressed"

Then either reboot the robot or use the pal-restart command to force a startup to begin again.

pal-restart web_commander

Example 2: add a new Demo button#

Let’s say you want to be able to trigger another speech of the robot from a Button in Demo’s tab. For this, open the following file:

ssh pal@ari-0c

nano /home/pal/.pal/wt/wt_ari_sections.yaml

And below the “7. Demos”, create a new Button:

"7. Demos":
    type: "Commands"
    parameters:
        buttons:
                - name: "About ARI"
                  say:
                        text: "I am a social robot that can do many things!"
                        lang: "en_GB"

Then either reboot the robot or use the “pal-restart” command to force a startup to begin again.

pal-restart web_commander