ros1_firos

This project is a fork of iml130/firos (https://github.com/iml130/firos) with adaptations to conform with FELICE requirements ==> expressions of entity types and ids of the entities

Changed features w.r.t. original version iml130/firos

Allow dots instead of slashes in FIWARE Entity IDs

• FIROS tries to directly relate the considered topic-string of ROS-side to the Entity-ID of FIWARE. ROS topic-strings usually only contain slashes as separators "/".

Firewall and networking setup when using FIROS in WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

Situation:

• By default, any external / incoming network traffic is not forwarded by Windows into the WSL instance.
• Communication from WSL to outside is fully enabled.
• Upon restart of the Windows host system, the WSL instance is assigned with a new IP-Address.

Solution:

• Manually allow incoming and outgoing traffic from / to contextBroker (IP address scope) on Windows host firewall

  • Get IP Addresses of ContextBroker (remote) and Windows host. If located in a VPN get the IP address that was assigned to the Windows host when connecting to the VPN.
  • Open Windows Defender Firewall and click "Advanced Settings" (will ask for administrator rights)
  • Add new inbound-rule of type "Scope"
    • Add ContextBroker IP-Address as "remote" IP
    • Add VPN assigned Windows host address as local IP (destination)
    • Add Profactor Windows host address as local IP (destination)
  • Add new outbound-rule of type "Scope"
    • Add ContextBroker IP-Address as "remote" IP (destination)
    • Add VPN assigned Windows host address as local IP
    • Add Profactor Windows host address as local IP

• If connected via VPN to external ContextBroker: Check if Communication ContextBroker and Windows Host is working now

  • Open LogMeIn Hamachi VPN client

  • Connect to FELICE network - You should then see all available hosts in the FELICE net, including the 'context-broker'

  • Perform a 'connection diagnose' test

    • Right-click on 'context-broker' host ==> Diagnose; see image below
    • In the next popup a positive 'OK' status should be displayed. Note: It could also be the case that 'context-broker' PC is in sleep mode! In this case the 'Details' subpage will indicate 'Connection Timeout' for both directions.

  • In case the diagnose test has failed - check if the traffic is allowed by the VPN client

    • Right-click on 'context-broker' host ==> Details; see image below
    • Allow all traffic to and from

  • If the 'connection diagnose' test fails with 'Connection Timeout' for both directions, the 'context-broker' PC is in sleep mode

    • Open the context-broker Entities URL a few times (using your default browser) and it will wake up!

• Manually activate port forwarding of needed ports into WSL instance

  • Open WSL console and type "ip address"
  • Mark and copy the IP address of the "eth0" interface
  • Open Windows host Powershell console and navigate to script network_setting_felice_manual.ps1
  • Edit the script:
    • in line 7, set the retrieved IP address in the assignment statement $remoteport = "172.29.252.158"
    • in line 9, add all ports that need to be forwarded to WSL $ports = @(5050, 1026, 10100);
  • Run the script in the Windows Powershell console (will ask for administrator rights)
  • Check status of port forwarding by executing netsh interface portproxy show v4tov4

• Alternative to manual activation of port forwarding:

  • Dependent on the installation of WSL, also the fully automated script might work
  • This one is located here
  • Just run it in Powershell (will ask for administrator rights). If not working, go for the 'manual way'
  • In case the script did not complain: Check status of port forwarding by executing netsh interface portproxy show v4tov4

Now the external ContextBroker should be able to able to reach a running WLS FIROS instance and vice-versa.

Perform a FIROS integration test with the remote ContextBroker

This section describes a simple integration test with ROS modules, FIROS and the remote FIWARE ContextBroker.

• Install ROS-Noetic in WSL

• Create a catkin-workspace

• Clone the projects as follows, and ensure to navigate into catkin_ws/src/ first.

  • git clone --recursive https://gitlab.profactor.at/felice_eu/ros1_firos firos (please make sure that all submodules are cloned properly)
  • git clone https://gitlab.profactor.at/felice_eu/ros1_felice_robot_execution_module felice_robot_execution_module
  • git clone https://gitlab.profactor.at/felice_eu/ros1_felice_ros_msgs felice_ros_msgs

• Navigate to catkin_ws/

• Build the workspace by running catkin_make, but ensure to have the ROS installation 'sourced' if that is not yet done automatically using .bashrc

• The folder /home/<wsl_user>/catkin_ws/src/felice_robot_execution_module/firos_config/ contains the firos-config files that are relevant for the felice_robot_execution_module. The most important files are config.json and topics.json

  • In config.json make sure to set the contextbroker IP address to the address of the context-broker PC within the FELICE VPN (most likely: 25.45.111.204), and the endpoint IP address to the IP your host was assigned within the FELICE VPN (this will specific for your installation)
  • In topics.json the outline of each topic configuration is as follows: "/ROS/Topic/topicBla" : ["ros_message_type", <subscriber/publisher>, <GUID or manual id-postfix / ALL_OF_BASE_ID or regular expression string>]
    • The "/ROS/Topic/topicBla" describes the used topic within ROS. Note that for the FIWARE entity-id this topic string will be used as a basis: all /es except the first one will be converted to dots.
    • The "ros_message_type" denotes the message type on ROS-side that will be used. On the FIWARE side, the message structure serves as basis for automatically constructing the FIWARE requests / contents (i.e. the JSON object on FIWARE side).
    • "subscriber" means that the FIROS module subscribes to all messages arriving at the mentioned topic on ROS-side, AND publishes them to FIWARE. If "GUID" is mentioned as a third parameter, a HEX GUID will be generated and appended to the entity-id on FIWARE side. If anything other than "GUID" is provided, exactly this string will be appended.
    • "publisher" means that the FIROS module subscribes to entity changes on FIWARE side, AND publishes them to the mentioned topic on ROS side. If "ALL_OF_BASE_ID" ist provided as third parameter, all entities having the base id (derived from the topic string) will be subscribed to. Alternatively a regular expression string can be provided for the subscription.

• create a few consoles and run the ros nodes as follows

  • roscore
  • rosrun felice_robot_execution_module pub_test_system_health
  • rosrun firos core.py --conf /home/<wsl_user>/catkin_ws/src/felice_robot_execution_module/firos_config/
  • the last node should run firos and will then publish the SystemHealth message entity to the ContextBroker. It will also create a subscription (just for testing) but as of current, nothing is received as noone is sending something at the other end.
  • You chan check the published entities on FIWARE side using the entities-URL. Subscriptions on FIWARE side are viewed using the subscriptions-URL.
  • On ROS side you can use rostopic pub and rostopic echo as usual.