Open vmayoral opened 1 month ago
Thanks @vmayoral!
There's an interesting opportunity to get this right within rerun.
could you expand on this? Sounds very interesting!
Hey @nikolausWest,
I'll try to expand on both the motivation and on the technical approach, sure:
rqt_graph
for (robot) graph visualization. This tool hasn't evolved alongside modern software concepts in robotics (aspects such as ROS Components as opposed to Nodes (or Nodelets) aren't depicted). There're plenty of limitations on this regard. You still can't easily properly represent other-than-pub/sub relationships into these graphs, for example client-server interactions such as ROS services
.rqt_graph
that I know are very lacking. For example Foxglove's Topic Graph is useless, probably resulting from a lack of understanding of the criticality of these graphs for demonstrating/showcasing/building/repairing/improving/debuging robots. There're other web-based robot graph visualizations that have been prototyped, but they simply lack the simplicity, (programming) usability, easy of customization and responsiveness that you folks at rerun seem to be taking at your core.services
or actions
.Components
vs Nodes
, or inter-network
vs intra-network
communications within a robotic system come to mind as relevantly unmet.SelectionPanel
to further augment information by selecting a node in the graph. This information could/should bet set programatically within each graph node, and could be extracted/relied from data-frameworks like ROS. Things like frequency of interactions, bandwidth, latencies (max/mean/min), etc would be tremendously useful if used together with your already existing ploting capabilities (e.g. TimeSeriesView
).[^1]: I can only throw a few initial ideas on the getting right topic, as "getting it right" would likely require iterations and feedback for its achievement
Most of the computations in robotics are expressed in the form of computational graphs. Whether you use ROS, ROS 2 or alternative frameworks, this seems to be the general consensus.
(an arbitrary ROS graph)
Besides their use for dev-purposes, these graphs are a fundamental tool when visualizing a robot's architecture. Most ROS-related graph representations are lacking. There's an interesting opportunity to get this right within rerun. That would make it much more useful for roboticists.