UDP

15 November 2023

UDP is an app for the sending of UDP messages to other devices. The objective behind the development of this application is allow to send UDP messages from an Android smartphone to other devices connected to the same network.

Project motivation

This application born from the necessity to send operation commands to mobile robots that are connected to WiFi networks. Smartphones have a great capacity of connection and communication and such thing makes them an ideal medium to send the required commands. Android platform is the most used: for this reason the decision to develop the app in this operative system was made.

The robots which I have worked need to be operated manually: commands must arrive the quickest way to its destiny. For this specific use case, the commands speed is more important than quality of service. In other words, is most important that the command arrive quickly than that it arrive with changes or errors. Its responsibility of the robot to check if the command is correct and if it should be executed.

Features

The initial app prototype accomplish the searched objective. App has a simple user interface with buttons like a gamepad. Every button send a different movement command to the robot.

Configuration menu of gamepad allows to adjust the behavior of every button: command contents can be changed, the amount of times that command is sent and the frequency which such command is send.

With the advance of the project, more interaction ways were added: one of them is a terminal view that display the text that is send and received.

Other added view is the programmable buttons. A vertical list allows to add buttons that can be configured in similar way as Gamepad View. User decide how many buttons are in the list, the name of the button, the command to be send, its format, the sent frequency of that command and the amount of times that such command is send.

Finalmente, se agregó un vista con contenidos de ayuda. En esta se encuentran definiciones básicas de los conceptos usados en la comunicación con el protocolo UDP, los modos de visualización de la app, etc.

Finally, a view with help contents were added. In this view are basic definitions of UDP protocol communications concepts, view modes, etc.

Personalización

An aesthetic feature of the app is that it allows you to change the base color of the theme and activate dark mode independently of the system. This allows you to adjust the appearance of the app to the user’s tastes and allows you to have the app running for long periods of time with low battery consumption with OLED type screens.

Usage sample

The app is commonly used to manually control mobile robots in the ExFacLab from National University of Colombia. The next video shows a tele operation test of the SDV4 robot with this app in gamepad mode.

This other video contains a tele operation demo with a virtual robot from ROS (TurtleSim). Shows in detail how the app is configured, how to check if the app send messages to the target computer and a movement test.

Get the app

This app is free and can be downloaded from PlayStore.