You will need a computer that is capable of running a browser that supports websockets and javascript. Most graphical browsers released in 2012 or later should support this. And a NAO robot for running the remote.
On your computer need the following installed.
- qi and qibuild python modules for installing behaviors (or use Choregraphe)
- rsync for copying files over to NAO and editing things
- ssh as the method of copying over files.
On a NAO V6 has a version of Python 3, but we will install our own Python. NAO V5, you will need to install Python 3. You will need the python module pyzmq for both Python 2 and Python 3. You will also need the tornado module for Python 3. You can use the provided binaries and modules from the dist directory as a timesaver. However, if you wish to build them yourself, there are instructions for building Python 3 and pyzmq in the doc directory.
In the past, the remote has run and worked with the Python 3 installed on NAO v6 and modules installed from its pip, but this has not been tested for a while. You can use remote_control/nao_server/requirements.txt in this case.
If you do not have a NAO, you can use still run the server and get a web page up to test, but you will not be able to run the client part. See Testing without a NAO.
- Choregraphe for creating new behaviors
- OpenSSL for generating a self-signed certificate
- The NAO Linux developer tools for your robot if you wish to cross-compile pyzmq and Python yourself (currently offline).
The remote control runs completely on NAO. The web page is served using Python 3.10 and the Tornado framework. It communicates with a Python 2 process to communicate with NAOqi via ZeroMQ. Installation consists of several steps.
- Installing Python 3, Python modules, and associated libraries
- Copying over the remote
- Installing behaviors
- Installing a TLS certificate
Much of the installation will use ssh, so one should probably have a public SSH key installed on NAO as well so you don't have to type passwords all the time.
In the dist directory are tarball archives that include the Python
3, pyzmq, and the associated libraries for NAO V5 and NAO V6. Copy the
tarball over to NAO and unpack the archive.
scp dist/remote_control-nao6-python310-and-zmq.tar.xz nao@nao-address:
ssh nao@nao-address tar xvf remote_control-nao6-python310-and-zmq.tar.xz
If you would rather build these libraries yourself, instructions are included in the doc directory
Use the sync-remote script top copy over the scripts. This uses
rsync and ssh to copy the bits over.
cd remote_control/scripts
./sync-remote.sh
Running this script later will only copy over the changed bits.
The behaviors for the remote are under nao_server/app. You can install
it using Choregraphe. Alternatively you can use qipkg from the
qibuild python module.
python3 -mvenv qibuild_env
source qibuild_env/bin/activate
pip install qi qibuild
cd nao-remote/remote_control/nao_server/app
qipkg deploy-package remote.pml --url [email protected]
You will need a TLS certificate for NAO in order to communicate
properly. The quickest way is to create a self-signed certificate on
NAO (You can use the openssl binary from dist if installed Python 3
using that). Assuming that the hostname for the NAO is nao.local,
which is the default when using zeroconf, the command would be.
openssl req -x509 -nodes -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout /home/nao/remote_control/nao_server/certs/nao.local.key -out /home/nao/remote_control/nao_server/certs/nao_local_cert.cer -days 365 -subj "/CN=nao.local"
Note that a self-signed certificate will generate a warning when accessing the page in most browsers.
After you have a certificate, modify
remote_control/nao_server/conf/server.conf so that the keyfile and
certfile fields point to the full path of these files. By default,
server will use look for files like above.
You can also run this command on another computer and copy the files over, but it is less secure.
If a NAO is getting a more permanent address (say nao.example.com). The best solution is to generate a certificate signing request and get a certificate authority to sign the request and issue a certificate that you can install. That is beyond the scope of this document.
Once you have all the parts installed, you should be able to run the remote and connect to it. First, you need to start the webserver and the NAOqi client. Here is a way to start them in the background.
/home/nao/remote_control/scripts/run_remote_naoqi.sh &
/home/nao/remote_control/scripts/run_remote_web.sh &
The order here is not important, but both must be started. Each script
creates a log file (remote.log and server.log respectively). That
you can use to check their status.
Assuming you didn't make any other changes to the configuration and your robot is reachable from nao.local, you should be able to connect to the robot over HTTPS on port 9526.
If your robot does not have a host address, use its IP-address instead. You can use the index.html in local directory to make this easier.
You can add entries under [program] in
/home/nao/naoqi/preferences/autoload.ini for the two scripts so that
the remote is ready when NAO starts up.
[program]
/home/nao/remote_control/scripts/run_remote_naoqi.sh
/home/nao/remote_control/scripts/run_remote_web.sh
It's not possible to easily test the NAOqi parts without a NAO robot
or a simulator that speaks NAOqi. However, you can run the remote
control locally to see how that looks. Make sure you have a TLS
certificate for localhost (see Installing a TLS
certificate) and that server.conf
knows where the certificate and keyfile are. Then, start
run_remote_web.sh and point your browser to https://localhost:9526