[ROS] Introduction to common tools in ROS (to be continued)

Introduce the tools commonly used in ROS development.But it will not be so comprehensive. If you want to know more in detail, please get familiar with the reference link at the end of the article.
These tools are updated as needed.

1. rqt

  rqt¹ is a Qt based softwareFramework, in the form of plugins for developing various ROS GUIs.It has the characteristics of good scalability, flexibility and ease of use, and cross-platform.Multiple GUI tools can be opened in rqt and these tools can still be run in the traditional standalone way.

1.1 install

  Initial installation of standard packages (rqt's core library and common plugins) can be installed by the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-<distro>-rqt$ sudo apt-get install ros-<distro>-rqt-common-plugins

Replace with the short name of the ROS distribution you installed (such as melodic or noetic, etc.).

1.2 running the rqt plugin

  rqt plugins can be run in the standard integrated window (recommended later) or separately.

• Run the rqt_gui integration GUI and start the plugin from the plugins menu.Choose one of the following two commands:

rqtrosrun rqt_gui rqt_gui

• Run each individual plugin, whichever plugin is needed.Choose one of the following two commands (our commonly used rqt_graph, rqt_plot, rqt_console, rqt_logger_level, rqt_bag is a plugin in the rqt core package and can be run without the rosrun command.):

rqt_graphrosrun rqt_graph rqt_graph

1.3 rqt common plugin: rqt_graph

Function: Visualize the ROS computational graph.It can display which Nodes and Topics are currently running, and the direction of message delivery, which can be displayed in this GUI.

Note: rqt_graph currently does not automatically update statistical notes.You must click the Refresh button to update them.

1.4 rqt common plugin: rqt_plot

Function: 2D drawing, which can dynamically draw the data on the topic in the form of 2D drawing.

1.5 rqt common plugins: rqt_console and rqt_logger_level

Function: Display and filter ROS messages.rqt_console is connected to ROS's logging framework to display node output information.rqt_logger_level allows us to change the verbosity level of output information including Debug, Info, Warn and Error while the node is running.

   Now let's take a look at the information output by turtlesim in rqt_console, and switch the log level in rqt_logger_level when using turtlesim.Run rqt_console and rqt_logger_level in two new terminals before starting turtlesim:

rqt_consolerqt_logger_level

  Start turtlesim, refresh the node in the rqt_logger_level window and select the turtlesim node, and set the log level Debug and Info and observe the information displayed in the rqt_console window.


Logger Level: Debug is the lowest priority and Fatal is the highest priority.For example, when the log level is set to Warn, you will get three levels of log messages Warn, Error and Fatal.

1.6 rqt common plugin: rqt_bag

Function: Record and playback bag files.

2. rosbag

2. Gazebo

2. RViz

2. rosbridge

2. moveit

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1. ROS.org. rqt[EB/OL]. 2016-08-30[2022-07-28]. https://wiki.ros.org/rqt. ︎