Introducing ROSboard: Easy-to-use ROS visualizations in your browser for ROS1+ROS2

[Dheera Venkatraman]

Hi everyone,

I’m the author of ROSshow (https://github.com/dheera/rosshow/), which
lets you visualize ROS topics with ASCII art.

I wanted to introduce ROSboard:
https://github.com/dheera/rosboard/
which simply runs on your robot as a ROS node, and serves up
live-streamed visualizations on https://your-robot-ip:8888/. It
already supports most common types, including Image, CompressedImage,
time-series data of all std_msgs types, NavSatFix, /rosout, LaserScan,
and even lets you stream the output of 'dmesg'.

This has been a long-running project of mine (I started working on it
before WebViz) but I’ve been looking to pick it up again due to
various inadequacies in WebViz.

A couple of the most important things I’m hoping to achieve with this:

ROS1/ROS2 compatible – it should work in both ROS versions! Tested in
noetic, foxy, galactic, it should work in kinetic and melodic as long
as you pip3 install rospkg. By the way, it makes use of my library
“rospy2” which allows for the same code to work in ROS1 and ROS2.

Mobile-friendly – one of my preferred ways of debugging (especially
outdoor) robots is to walk around with the robot and a phone. Being
able to answer questions like "how much does the motor current jump if
I put a load on top of the robot" in a few seconds with a phone-based
visualization in one hand and a tool in the other.

Easily extensible – creating a custom visualization involves only
adding ONE .js file and adding a reference to it in the main .js file.

Happy to hear any experiences / suggestions / what you would like to
see in something like this!

____________________
Dheera Venkatraman
http://dheera.net

[Kar-Han Tan]

Hi Dheera,

That's super cool! One thing Isaac has is the web-based interface WebSight which can be accessed with smartphones is very nice, and it sound like ROSboard does the same for ROS. Does ROSboard also support a "virtual gamepad" (https://docs.nvidia.com/isaac/isaac/packages/navigation/doc/virtual-gamepad.html )?

cheers,

Kar Han 

[Steve " 'dillo" Okay]

Thanks Dheera,

I'll check it out. It seems like there are a number of robotics management & monitoring tools out there now.

I've been a big fan of Foxglove myself recently, but always open to looking at new tools, esp. ones that help with monitoring and managing the firehose of data coming off our robots these days.

I like the idea of ASCII-art tools which don't need X11-style display permissions or local display drivers installed just to get a simple view of the status of things.

I too dream of a handheld system that i can monitor and control my robot(s) from, although probably bigger than a phone :)

"Bring yourself online Tenacity..." :)

'dillo

On Thursday, July 15, 2021 at 3:33:23 PM UTC-7 Dheera Venkatraman wrote:

[Dheera Venkatraman]

Yep, for ASCII art definitely check out ROSshow! I'm working on ROS2
support, almost done.
If you're looking for something handheld that's bigger than a phone,
ROSboard should work well on tablets as well.

____________________
Dheera Venkatraman
http://dheera.net

Steve " 'dillo" Okay <espre...@gmail.com> 於 2021年7月18日 週日 上午6:55寫道：

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