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.

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• 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-${ROS_DISTRO}-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 ${ROS_DISTRO}

Quick Start Demo

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

ros2 launch rviz_visual_tools demo_rviz.launch.py

Then start the RViz Visual Tools demo:

ros2 run rviz_visual_tools rviz_visual_tools_demo

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.hpp>

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", node));

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

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Changelog for package rviz_visual_tools

4.0.3 (2021-12-13)

• Make sure to add all dependencies to the package.xml (#209) (#214)
• Backport Fix faulty templated constructor (#213)
• Contributors: Vatan Aksoy Tezer, Chris Lalancette

4.0.2 (2021-10-07)

• Add pluginlib dependency. (#203)
• Re-enable RemoteControl functionality (#204)
  • use condition_variable to be more thread safe
  • Drop executor from constructor, deprecate old one
  • Fix RemoteControl usage in demo
  • Use SystemDefaultsQOS for RemoteControl subscriber
  • Add RvizVisualToolsGui dashboard to rviz config, correct view
• Rename node_executable to executable (#201)
• Contributors: Davide Faconti, Henning Kayser, Jafar Abdi, Steven! Ragnarök, Vatan Aksoy Tezer

4.0.1 (2021-09-14)

• Remove executor namespace from rclcpp (#190)
• Fixes & improvements for deleting markers (#188)
  • Added RvizVisualTools method to delete all markers in a namespace
  • Fixed deleteAllMarkers for all namespaces
  • Added getters for marker ID's
• Move waitForSubscriber function to header file (#185)
• Create LICENSE (#183)
• Contributors: Jafar Abdi, Nathan Brooks, Vatan Aksoy Tezer, Wyatt Rees

4.0.0 (2021-04-09)

• Fix warning about deprecation (#180) rclcpp::executor::FutureReturnCode was removed
• Update to offer shared_ptr to create_timer
• Fix rviz_visual_tools_gui (#147)
• Compilation for Windows (#143)
• Remove stl file in preparation for LFS setup (#140)
• Add function deleteMarker: deletes marker for given namespace and id (#137)
• fix waitForSubscriber time (#142)
• Eloquent cleanup (#135)
  • some misc cleanup of the imarker simple lib
  • actually reset marker counts
  • changes for using IMarker simple as a library
• Fix rviz warnings about scale and uninitialized quaternions (#129)
• Normalize interactive marker quaternions. (#132)
• normalize before publish (#131)
• New helper function getIdentityPose() (#122)
• For ABCD planes: better comments, ensure the plane equation is satisfied. (#120) Co-Authored-By: Henning Kayser <<henningkayser@picknik.ai>>
• Make [rviz_visual_tools]{.title-ref} publish triangle mesh and [tf_visual_tools]{.title-ref} clean published transforms (#117)
  • Add [clearAllTransform]{.title-ref} method to tf_visual_tools
  • Add new function to publish mesh marker from triangles and vertices
• Publish plane from Ax+By+Cz+D=0 equation (#119)
• Fixed publishCylinder namespace (#109)
• Remove default arguments to make function calls not ambiguous (#112)
• Initialize quaternions in demo to avoid warning (#111)
• Fix node type in demo launch files (#110)
• Use LOGNAME for logging re:moveit styel (#106)
• Contributors: AndyZe, Bjar Ne, Dave Coleman, Jafar Abdi, Mike Lautman, Mori, MoriKen, Nathan Brooks, Sean Yen, Victor Lamoine, Yu Yan, d-walsh, hshose

3.7.0 (2018-11-26)

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