Logging, monitoring and debugging
RQt
RQt is a graphical user interface framework (Qt for ROS) that implements various tools and interfaces in the form of plugins.
Qt is a cross-platform application framework that is widely used for developing application software with a graphical user interface (GUI)
One can run all the existing GUI tools as dockable windows within RQt. The tools can still run in a traditional standalone method, but RQt makes it easier to manage all the various windows in a single screen layout.
You can run any RQt tools/plugins easily by (This GUI allows you to choose any available plugins on your system):
rqt
You can also run plugins in standalone windows:
ros2 run rqt_graph rqt_graph- show graph of nodes and topics (rqt_graph is a part of rqt_graph package)rqt_graph is a dynamic GUI plugin for visualizing the ROS computation graph (dynamic plugin is a plugin that can be loaded and unloaded at runtime)
ros2 run rqt_image_view rqt_image_view- show image from camera (rqt_image_view is a part of rqt_image_view package)ros2 run rqt_py_console rqt_py_console- interactive Python consolePlotJuggler - a tool for visualizing time series data from ROS. It is a Qt-based application that can be used to plot and analyze data from ROS topics.
sudo apt-get install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-plotjuggler-ros- install PlotJugglerros2 run plotjuggler plotjuggler- run PlotJuggler
Recording and playing back data
ros2 bag is a command line tool for recording data published on topics in your system. It accumulates the data
passed on any number of topics and saves it in a file. You can then replay the data to reproduce the
results of your tests and experiments.
Note
NB! Starting from ROS 2 Iron, the default bag file type has been changed from .db3 (sqlite3) to .mcap (MCAP).
ros2 bag record <topic_name>- record messages from a topic to a bag fileros2 bag play <bag_file>- play back messages from a bag fileros2 bag info <bag_file>- display information about a bag file
MCAP
MCAP (pronounced “em-cap”) is an open source container file format for multimodal log data. It supports multiple channels of timestamped pre-serialized data, and is ideal for use in pub/sub or robotics applications.