Setting up an Ubuntu machine to connect to the robot’s VPN

IPs might be different for your robot. Please ask someone from the STRANDS team.

Connecting via Network-Manager

In order to connect a random PC to the robot, it first needs to be able to connect to the robot via TCP port 1723. The onboard PC (with local IP 192.168.0.100 and remote IP as assigned by the WiFi DHCP server, the remote IP is referred to as ``WLAN_IP`` from now on) acts as a gateway.

  1. Make sure the Network-Manager PPTP plugin is installed: sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp-gnome
  2. Create a new VPN connection in Network-Manager using PPTP protocol
  3. Set ``WLAN_IP`` as the gateway address (ask a member of the STRANDS team to get it)
  4. set username and password (ask a member of the STRANDS team to get it)
  5. In the “VPN” tab, choose “Advanced”, and select “Use Point-to-Point encryption (MPPE)”
  6. In the “IPv4 Settings” tab, choose “Address Only”
  7. Click on “Routes” in the “IPv4 Settings” tab, and select “Use this connection only for resources on its own network”
  8. Still in “Routes” add a static route with
  • Address: 192.168.0.0
  • Netmask: 24
  • Gateway: 0.0.0.0
  1. save and connect to the new VPN network,… Tadaaa, you should be connected. (Note: This connection is only used to connect to the robot, all other network traffic on your computer still goes via the default route, not the robot!)

configure /etc/hosts

in order to have it all working nicely for ROS to find all machines, you need to add the robot’s IP addresses in /etc/hosts on your own machine like this: The following is an example taken from Linda. Please ask a member of the team for the correct IP range

192.168.0.100 linda
192.168.0.101 left-cortex
192.168.0.102 right-cortex

192.168.0.230   vpn-00
192.168.0.231   vpn-01
192.168.0.232   vpn-02
192.168.0.233   vpn-03
192.168.0.234   vpn-04
192.168.0.235   vpn-05
192.168.0.236   vpn-06
192.168.0.237   vpn-07
192.168.0.238   vpn-08
192.168.0.239   vpn-09
192.168.0.240   vpn-10
192.168.0.241   vpn-11
192.168.0.242   vpn-12
192.168.0.243   vpn-13
192.168.0.244   vpn-14
192.168.0.245   vpn-15
192.168.0.246   vpn-16
192.168.0.247   vpn-17
192.168.0.248   vpn-18
192.168.0.249   vpn-19
192.168.0.250   vpn-20
192.168.0.251   vpn-21
192.168.0.252   vpn-22

Enjoy

You should be all set now. Just run

  1. export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://<robot_name>:11311/ and
  2. export ROS_HOSTNAME=vpn-XX to your assign name, with XX matching your assign IP (see above)

You should be able to e.g. run rosrun rviz rviz displaying all data streams.

convenience scripts

At UOL we use a little script to set our desktop PCs to use the robot ROS infrastructure, called robot-overlord.sh. Simply download it and run source robot-overlord.sh. This works for Linda. Please adjust robot name appropriately if you work on one of the other robots.

Original page: https://github.com/strands-project/lamor15/wiki/Robot-VPN-to-connect-from-Desktop-PCs-and-Laptops