Drive by Dock Robotics (Beta) – Mobile Teleop for ROS 1 & 2 Robots

Projects
1

Hi everyone,

I’m Josh, founder of Dock Robotics. We’ve been building a mobile app called Drive to simplify robot teleoperation from your phone — and it’s now in open beta on iOS.

Drive supports both ROS 1 and ROS 2, using rosbridge under the hood to provide live camera streaming and joystick control via an intuitive mobile interface. It’s designed for developers, educators, and field operators who want quick access to their robots to test new behaviours or run demos.

You can connect your phone to the robot over different networks, not just on the same LAN — making it easier to work across remote sites or field environments.

I’m currently looking for beta testers to:

  • Try the app with ROS-based robots (real or simulated)

  • Share feedback on what works, what doesn’t, and what you’d love to see next

  • Help shape the tool as we iterate and update it

The app is currently available on iOS via TestFlight, with Android support coming soon.

If you’d like to try it I’d be happy to share the beta link and help get you set up.

Thanks!

Josh

image
image1290×2188 53.4 KB

1 Like
2

Actually, rosbridge isn’t such a good choice for this. For any remote video streaming you’ll want to use webrtc or similar, see the blog post below.

Tl;dr: rosbridge (a) sends individually compressed images rather than using 100x more efficient stream compression like h264, and (b) won’t handle network issues the right way: it will incur latency when it should dynamically reduce image quality instead and it won’t drop old frames in favor of newer ones.

1 Like
ROS News for the Week of August 4th, 2025