ROS tools

ROS has a variety of GUI and command-line tools to inspect and debug messages. Let's look at some commonly used ones.

Rviz (ROS Visualizer)

Rviz (http://wiki.ros.org/rviz) is one of the 3D visualizers available in ROS to visualize 2D and 3D values from ROS topics and parameters. Rviz helps visualize data such as robot models, robot 3D transform data (TF), point cloud, laser and image data, and a variety of different sensor data.

Figure 10: Point cloud data visualized in Rviz

rqt_plot

The rqt_plot program (http://wiki.ros.org/rqt_plot) is a tool for plotting scalar values that are in the form of ROS topics. We can provide a topic name in the Topic box.

Figure 11: rqt_plot

rqt_graph

The rqt_graph (http://wiki.ros.org/rqt_graph) ROS GUI tool can visualize the graph of interconnection between ROS nodes.

Figure 12: rqt_graph

Note

The complete list of ROS tools is available at the following link: http://wiki.ros.org/Tools