Operation - Use the Dashboard#

This section shows how to use the Duckietown Dashboard on the Duckiebot.

What is in the Dashboard?#

The following video provides a brief tour of the most important features of the Duckietown Dashboard on your Duckiebot.

To see all the available dashboard components, you will need to first log in. Once logged into the dashboard, you will see a navigation panel down the left side of the page. The 7 available subpages are:

PAGE NAME

DESCRIPTION

Portainer

A nice GUI tool for seeing all containers running on a Duckiebot

File Manager

A file manager for managing the files on the robot

Robot

A summary page for the robot status

Profile

Information for your duckietown account

Package Store

A package store contain all available packages for your Duckiebot

Users

Advanced Feature: Allow multiple students to use one Duckiebot

Settings

Advanced Feature: Change configuration of your Duckiebot dashboard manually

Restful API

Advanced Feature: Documentation to the RestAPI exposed by the Dashboard.

Let’s dive into a few pages that you will need to get started.

The Robot Page#

In this page you will find several tabs that help you see and understand the status of your Duckiebot. The default tab is Info.

Robot - Info#

In this tab, you can find information for your robot - including your robot name, type, configuration, and critical information such as CPU usage, temperature, and other crucial robot vitals.

../../_images/dashboard_info.png

Note

From this page you can read the Duckiebot’s firmware version, i.e., the version of the base image used during initialization.

Robot - Mission Control#

This is the Mission Control tab.

../../_images/dashboard_mission_control.png

In this tab you can see what the Duckiebot sees via the iamge stream, the lateral and angular speed of your robot, and a plot of left and right motor speed. This is the tab that lets you monitor and control your Duckiebot.

Tip

The page contains 4 blocks by default. Feel free to drag them around and rearrange them as you please. You can also use the menu button of each block to resize them.

Troubleshooting

SYMPTOM

I do not see the camera image on the dashboard.

RESOLUTION

This could be caused by a few issues. Make sure you are accessing the dashboard using https://ROBOT_HOSTNAME.local/ instead of directly accessing the dashboard using robot IP address. Make sure the lens cap has been removed from your camera. If you still don’t see an image, jump to the Operation - Make it See page for more debugging options.

The Health Page#

This is the Health Page. It will show you a plot of the robot’s health status such as temperature, frequency, and CPU usage. It is a good debugging tool to watch your code’s resource usage.

../../_images/dashboard-health.png

The Architecture Page#

This is the Architecture Page. It will allow you to visualize all the published ROS topics and see their details. It is a useful tool to see what is running and what is not. You can also use this tool as a replacement of rqt-graph. For more instructions on rqt-graph, you can see it here

../../_images/dashboard-architecture.png

The Portainer Page#

Portainer is a provided tool for managing all the docker containers that are running on the Duckiebot. Using portainer tools, you can quickly see the status of the containers on your Duckiebot.

../../_images/dashboard-portainer.png

You can select containers to see all the containers on the Duckiebot.

For more information about portainer, you can find them in this page.