Transitive

According to the official website:

“Transitive is an open-source framework for full-stack robotics. It is designed to make it easy to create capabilities that seamlessly connect robot, cloud, and web front-ends including a dynamically updating shared data model.”

It provides software to setup real-time data synchronization between our robots and the cloud. Furthermore does it provide capabilities: modular packages that add web-based features like video streaming or teleportation. This documentation shows how Transitive can be used in combination with our software stack.

Agent

To connect a robot to the online Transitive portal, one requires to run a Transitive agent on the robot. To do this, one can simply use the transitive_agent docker container in our repository. This container expects a transitive.env file in the home directory of the host device with the following content:

TR_INSTALL_HASH=<unique_robot_id_in_fleet>
TR_USERID=<user_id_transitive_account>
TR_ROBOT_TOKEN=<token_from_transitive_account>
TR_DISPLAYNAME=${TR_INSTALL_HASH}
TR_LABELS=<optional_labels_separated_by_comma>

Create the file if it doesn’t exist yet, fill the required variables with a unique id for the robot. Next, one can start the container:

cd alliander_robotics/transitive/agent
docker compose up -d

  • For debugging purposes, one can also start the container without the -d flag, so that the terminal stays attached to the container.

  • The container contains a ROS2 installation. Since network_mode: host is specified in the compose file, the agent can communicate with all the ROS2 nodes from the other containers we start on our robot.

  • The compose file specifies privileged: true, since this is a requirement to run the agent as it uses linux namespaces to sandbox capabilities.

  • The compose file specifies restart: unless-stopped, which means that this container should automatically restart, for example after a reboot. Only when stopped manually, the container does not restart, which is desirable when using the agent on a laptop to test with simulation.

Portal

To monitor the robots running a Transitive agent, one can visit the online portal at https://portal.transitiverobotics.com/. After logging, the Devices page is shown where one can select a robot in the fleet. After selecting a device, the device page will be opened where capabilities can be added to the robot.

Web UI

One can embed the capabilities added in the portal to a web page. Embedding allows to set specific settings for the capability. Right now, we have a very basic Web UI that can be served locally using Vite. To do this, one can simply use the transitive_ui docker container in our repository. This container expects a transitive.env file in the home directory of the host device with the following content:

VITE_USERID=${TR_USERID}
VITE_JWT_SECRET=<JWT secret in our Transitive account>

Fill the required variables. Next, one can start the container:

cd alliander_robotics/transitive/ui
docker compose up

The Web UI is locally served using Vite and the terminal shows the address to open the web page.