Chapter 11. Designing a GUI for a Robot Using Qt and Python

In the last chapter, we discussed the integration of robotic hardware components and software packages for performing autonomous navigation. After the integration, the next step is to build a GUI to control the robot. We are building a GUI that can act as a trigger for the underlying ROS commands. Instead of running all the commands on the terminal, the user can work with the GUI buttons. The GUI we are going to design is for a typical hotel room with nine tables. The user can set a table position in the map of the hotel room and command the robot to go to a particular table to deliver food. After delivering the food, the user can command the robot to go to its home position.

Some of the most popular GUI frameworks currently available are Qt (http://qt.digia.com) and GTK+ (http://www.gtk.org/), Qt and GTK+ are open source, cross-platform user interface toolkits and development platforms. These two software frameworks are widely used...