Rviz Visual Tools

C++ API wrapper for displaying shapes and meshes in Rviz via helper functions that publish markers. Useful for displaying and debugging data. For more advanced robot visualization features, see the moveit_visual_tools which builds on this class.

This package includes:

• Rviz Panel GUI to step through your code for debugging and testing
• Rviz-based keyboard control for stepping through application
• Easy to use helper functions for visualizing in Rviz fast
• Basic geometric markers for Rviz
• More complex geometric shapes such as coordinate frames, framed boxes, planes, paths, graphs
• Ability to quickly choose standard colors and sizes
• Tools to ensure proper connection to Rviz before publishing visualizations
• Shortcuts to convert between different types of points and poses - ROS msgs, Eigen, tf, etc
• Batch publishing capabilities to reduce over throttling ROS messages
• A tf publishing helper class
• An interactive marker helper class

Developed by Dave Coleman at the Correll Robotics Lab, University of Colorado Boulder with help from Andy McEvoy and many others.

• Travis CI
• ROS Kinetic Buildfarm - AMD64 Xenial Debian Build for Ubuntu 16.04
• ROS Kinetic Buildfarm - AMD64 Xenial Devel Build for Ubuntu 16.04
• ROS Melodic Buildfarm - AMD64 Bionic Debian Build for Ubuntu 18.04
• ROS Melodic Buildfarm - AMD64 Bionic Devel Build for Ubuntu 18.04

Install

Ubuntu Debian

sudo apt-get install ros-melodic-rviz-visual-tools

Build from Source

Clone this repository into a catkin workspace, then use the rosdep install tool to automatically download its dependencies. Depending on your current version of ROS, use:

rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro melodic

Quick Start Demo

To see random shapes generated in Rviz, first launch Rviz:

roslaunch rviz_visual_tools demo_rviz.launch

Then start demo:

roslaunch rviz_visual_tools demo.launch

Code API

See the Doxygen documentation

Usage

We’ll assume you will be using these helper functions within a class. Almost all of the functions assume you are publishing transforms in the world frame (whatever you call that e.g. /odom).

Initialize

Add to your includes:

#include <rviz_visual_tools/rviz_visual_tools.h>

Add to your class’s member variables:

// For visualizing things in rviz
rviz_visual_tools::RvizVisualToolsPtr visual_tools_;

In your class’ constructor add:

visual_tools_.reset(new rviz_visual_tools::RvizVisualTools("base_frame","/rviz_visual_markers"));

Change the first parameter to the name of your robot’s base frame, and the second parameter to whatever name you’d like to use for the corresponding Rviz marker ROS topic.

Tools

Now in your code you can easily debug your code using visual markers in Rviz

Start rviz and create a new marker using the ‘Add’ button at the bottom right. Choose the marker topic to be the same as the topic you specified in the constructor.

Example Code

In the following snippet we create a pose at xyz (0.1, 0.1, 0.1) and rotate the pose down 45 degrees along the Y axis. Then we publish the pose as a arrow for visualziation in Rviz. Make sure your Rviz fixed frame is the same as the one chosen in the code.

// Create pose
Eigen::Isometry3d pose;
pose = Eigen::AngleAxisd(M_PI/4, Eigen::Vector3d::UnitY()); // rotate along X axis by 45 degrees
pose.translation() = Eigen::Vector3d( 0.1, 0.1, 0.1 ); // translate x,y,z

// Publish arrow vector of pose

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Changelog for package rviz_visual_tools

3.8.0 (2019-09-18)

• Windows bring up. (#116)
• Change email address (#114)
• Fixed publishCylinder namespace (#109)
• Remove default arguments to make function calls not ambiguous (#112)
  • Remove default arguments to make function calls not ambiguous
  • Remove further default values
  • Add unit tests for publishPath() functions, make sucess return value more stringent
• Initizalize quaternions in demo to avoid warning (#111)
• Fix node type in demo launch files (#110)
• Only auto-assign one reviewer (#107)
• Use LOGNAME for logging re:moveit styel (#106)
• Document Github Probot for Auto Assign (#101)
• Contributors: Dave Coleman, Sean Yen, Victor Lamoine, d-walsh

3.7.0 (2018-11-26)

• Fix Eigen::Affine3d for Melodic (using Eigen::Isometry3d) (#105)
• Improve documentation (#100)
• Fix some catkin_lint warnings and rename targets output (#98)
• Update README Kinetic to Melodic (#102)
• Add Melodic build farm badges (#99)
• Add ccache support (#93)
• no ros::spinOnce() (#82)
• Deprecate old functions for ROS Melodic (#91)
• Improve package with catkin_lint (#89)
• Add OGRE dependency (#88)
• Automoc requires at least cmake version 2.8.6 (#86)
• Fix Travis badge (#84)
• The code already uses AUTOMOC (#76)
• Contributors: Dave Coleman, Jochen Sprickerhof, Michael Görner, Simon Schmeisser, Victor Lamoine

3.6.1 (2018-05-31)

• Actually link qt code into the gui library (#74)
• Contributors: Michael Goerner

3.6.0 (2018-01-15)

• Addresses Issue #49 - Default Constructor Not Nodelet Friendly
• Added option to pass in a node handle in the constructor that defaults to
• Reset marker should publish initialized quaternion
• Improve code quality - add const, static, C++11 features, clang-format
• Create demo executable for IMarkerSimple
• Improve memory efficiency of functions
• Contributors: Dave Coleman, Geoffrey Chiou, Victor Lamoine

3.5.1 (2017-12-25)

• Normalize quaternion before storage
• Fix for ambiguous function call to publishAxis
• Add linking to visualization tools library for imarker_simple
• Added arrow pub to take two points
• Document clang-tidy
• catkin lint
• roslint applied
• Clang-format again
• Clang-tidy ALL
• C++11 optimizations
• Fix deprecated calls to convertFromXYZRPY
• Add new convertPoseSafe() function
• New convertFromXYZRPY() function to avoid deprecation warning
• Allow to enable frame locking in the markers/markers arrays
• Update license year
• IMarkerSimple: set name and pose
• New printTransformFull() function
• Removed deprecated warning
• New class for easily using 6dof imarkers
• More options to tf_visual_tools
• Update README.md

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