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rosbridge-xviz-connector

README.md

rosbridge-xviz-connector

This is a proxy server that:

  • read data from rosbridge_server via websocket using the roslib package;
  • convert ROS message format into xviz;
  • expose a xviz server via websocket using Uber's @xviz pakcage.

Dependencies

  • both rosbridge_server and roslib are part of rosbridge_suite that allows interaction with ROS topics via websocket (which is a common streaming protocol for web services).

  • XVIZ is a protocal (on top of websocket) for real time transfer and visualization of autonomy data opensourced by Uber.

Steps to run the server

You will need ROS installed in your system before doing the following steps. If you have not done so, refer to ROS documentation.

  1. If you don't have rosbridge server installed (i.e. rospack find rosbridge_server returns nothing), install with:

    sudo apt install ros-<rosdistro>-rosbridge-suite

  2. Start rosbridge server with:

    roslaunch rosbridge_server rosbridge_websocket.launch

    By default it listens on port 9090 for websocket connections. It also registers a node called rosbridge_websocket which you can verify by rosnode list.

  3. Optional: Testing rosbridge connection with a browser and Autoronto rosbag:

    # run the Autoronto rosbag:
rosbag play _2019-01-23-13-28-36_imu_baselink-007.bag

    Then open websocket-client-test.html in a browser. You should be able to see data coming from the topic /navsat/fix.

  4. Start rosbridge-xviz-connector by:

    ## you should have done yarn install to get dependencies before running
yarn start ## or node ./index.js

Reference Frames in XVIZ Protocol

The official XVIZ documentation has no clear description of their reference frames. However through playing around with test data, we discovered that XVIZ use a right handed reference frame with fixed orientation:

  • Origin of the reference frame is given by a MapOrigin defined by (latitude, longitude, altitude).

  • Y-axis always point to North.

  • X-axis always point to East.

  • Z-axis always point up vertically.