robot_nav_rviz_plugins

RViz visualizations for robot_navigation datatypes

PathDisplay

This is a simple port of rviz::PathDisplay but to work with nav_2d_msgs::Path2D.

Polygon Displays

The existing rviz::PolygonDisplay draws only the outline of a given polygon, and cannot fill the polygon in with color. This package has three new RViz displays for polygon data:

• robot_nav_rviz_plugins::Polygon3DDisplay will display geometry_msgs/PolygonStamped messages just like rviz::PolygonDisplay except it can fill in the polygon.
• robot_nav_rviz_plugins::PolygonDisplay displays nav_2d_msgs/Polygon2DStamped messages
• robot_nav_rviz_plugins::PolygonsDisplay (note the S in PolygonS) will display nav_2d_msgs/Polygon2DCollection messages.

Each has three display modes, for displaying just the outline, just the filler, or both.

The behavior is showcased by running roslaunch robot_nav_viz_demos polygons.launch.

NavGridDisplay

This is a robust refactoring of rviz::MapDisplay to not only support nav_msgs::OccupancyGrid but also the nav_2d_msgs::NavGridOfChars and nav_2d_msgs::NavGridOfDoubles datatypes. There are couple of noteworthy added features.

Dynamic Color Support

rviz::MapDisplay had three hard-coded color schemes for coloring pixels based on the map data.

• Map Gray scale for [0, 100], green for [101, 127], red/yellow for [128, 254] and bluish gray for 255.
• Costmap, Invisible for 0, cyan for 99, purple for 100, bluish-gray for 255, and then the same green/red/yellow as Map for [101, 254].
• Raw Gray scale for [0, 255]

The new NavGridDisplay types have those color schemes implemented, but also allows for arbitrary other mappings of colors using pluginlib. Just define an extension of robot_nav_rviz_plugins::NavGridPalette with a unique name and list of as many as 256 colors.

Dynamic Value Scaling

In the past, if you wanted to display a grid of values, you would need to either convert it into an OccupancyGrid and use the hard-coded color schemes above, or you would need to convert it to a PointCloud2 and use a Color Transform. The NavGridOfDoublesDisplay allows you to publish unbounded double values, and the scale will be dynamically calculated, so the minimum values appear on one side of the NavGridPalette and the maximum on the other, even as the extremes change.

Furthermore, there is an option to ignore particular values.

• If you don’t want the value -1 to be included, you can set the Ignore Value Type to Value, and the Ignore Value to -1, and then -1 will not be included in the dynamic bounds.
• If you don’t want any values above 2000 to be included, you can set the Ignore Value Type to Limit and the Ignore Value to 2000 and then any values greater than or equal to 2000 will be ignored.