search

cruise-automation / webviz

web-based visualization libraries
https://webviz.io/
Apache License 2.0
2.07k stars 413 forks source link

LCM support #400

Closed lhcubillos closed 4 years ago

lhcubillos commented 4 years ago

Hi! Are there any plans to extend WebViz to support LCM? (https://lcm-proj.github.io/). If not, do you have any advice on how to adapt the app to LCM? It works in a very similar way as ROS, and has the equivalent of ROSbags as well.

janpaul123 commented 4 years ago

Currently not, and internally we're pretty tied to the binary format of ROS bags. Are there any conversion tools from their data format to ROS bags? That might be the easiest approach.

lhcubillos commented 4 years ago

They don't have a native one, but it's probably not that big a challenge, so thank you for the advice! What about the live feed (not from rosbags)? Do you think it would be possible to adapt it to LCM? LCM works using UDP multicast, with no master node.

janpaul123 commented 4 years ago

That might be a bit harder, but once you have some code to convert from LCM to the ROS message format it shouldn't be too hard. You could write a ROS node that subscribes to the LCM messages, converts them to ROS messages, and publishes them to a ROS master (ideally on different topics). Then you'd only have to boot that ROS node, a ROS master, and the rosbridge, and it should hopefully all work?

So yeah, the biggest step would probably be doing that initial conversion to the bag format.

lhcubillos commented 4 years ago

Thank you! That is a very good idea.

janpaul123 commented 4 years ago

Cool, keep us posted on how it goes! Would be cool if we can link future people with the same problem to whatever you come up with. 😃