Understanding the ROS visualization tool (RViz) and its plugins
The RViz tool is an official 3D visualization tool of ROS. Almost all kinds of data from sensors can be viewed through this tool. RViz will be installed along with the ROS desktop full installation. Let's launch RViz and see the basic components present in RViz.
Start roscore
:
$ roscore
Start rviz
:
$ rviz
The important sections of the RViz GUI are marked, and the uses of each section are shown in the following screenshot:
Displays panel
The panel on the left side of the RViz is called the Displays
panel. The Displays
panel contains a list of the display plugins of RViz and its properties. The main use of display plugins is to visualize different types of ROS messages, mainly sensor data in the RViz 3D viewport. There are lots of display plugins already present in RViz for viewing images from the camera, and for viewing the 3D point cloud, LaserScan, robot model, TF, and so on. Plugins can be added by pressing the Add
button on the...