oscardegroot / ros_tools

Wrappers for ROS visualization, benchmarking and data saving in C++

ROS Tools

This package is a tool package for C++ ROS/ROS2 that standardizes and simplifies basic features over ROS/ROS2.

Table of Contents

1. Features
2. Installation
3. Examples
4. License

Features

This package is a tool package for ROS/ROS2 that contains:

• Tools for visualization in RViz ros_visuals.cpp

• Tools for data saving data_saver.h

• Tools for profiling in profiling.h

• Tools for logging in logging.h

• Various other tools

Installation

Clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/oscardegroot/ros_tools.git

Install dependencies with

rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y

To define its ROS version, run python3 switch_to_ros.py <ROS_VERSION>, with ROS_VERSION either 1 or 2.

Note that a rough python version of the visuals is also provided under scripts, but is not actively maintained.

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Examples

A ROS1 example is provided in src/example.cpp. Run the example with ros launch ros1_example.launch.

You should see the following in rviz:

Visualization

The visualization wrappers for RViz are provided in ros_tools/visuals.h. For example, the following code draws a cube at the origin on the topic ros_tools/example:

        auto &publisher = VISUALS.getPublisher("ros_tools/example");
        auto &cube = publisher.getNewPointMarker("CUBE");
        cube.setColorInt(0, 5);                           
        cube.setScale(0.25, 0.25, 0.25);                 
        cube.addPointMarker(Eigen::Vector3d(0., 0., 0.)); 
        publisher.publish()

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Debugging

This package provides useful commands for logging/debugging.

• ROSTOOLS_HOOK prints the line and file where it is in the terminal and can be clicked in VSCode.
• ROSTOOLS_ASSERT prints its line and file when the assert fails.
• LOG_INFO, LOG_WARN, LOG_ERROR, LOG_SUCCESS logs info messages

Profiling

Profiling output is stored in the package that is selected in its initialization (see the example). To view the output, open chrome and go to chrome://tracing/. Click load in the top left and navigate and select <your_package>/profiler.json.

The output of the example is the following:

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Data Saving

Data is saved in ros_tools/scripts/data/example_data.txt. See the example for more details.

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License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license - see the LICENSE file for details.

ros_tools's Issues

Undefined reference spline_4_d

If using ROS1 and thus using the switch_to_ros.py script, the not-found file is added back to the CMakeLists.txt.

ros_tools/CMakeLists1.txt

Line 45 in a15cc15

src/spline_four_d.cpp