I’m curious if there are any plans/interest in adding support for MoveIt capabilities in Foxglove Studio. Foxglove Studio seems to be an attractive alternative to rviz in terms of flexibility in creating a user interface for diagnostics and interaction with the robot, but it seems to be lacking in some of the capabilities that would make it useful in a manipulator setting (displaying arm trajectories, overlayed meshes on the camera feed, etc.). Would this development be better handled in the MoveIt codebase or in Foxglove?
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I would also love to see this. Rviz is old, hardly maintained, has tons of bugs and limitations…
Are you looking for tools that already have existing interfaces, or are you just asking about alternatives to RViz for developing your own custom visualizations? It seems to me like the former, but maybe if there are tools out there that already have the “panels” you need, that may be okay too?
In the fully FOSS realm, I’m sure you’ve dug into RViz Visual Tools, which would give you that ability to add a bit more visualization to RViz besides just the standard widgets they offer.
As for the pre-existing visualization tooling that allows some customization, there is Foxglove, and we’re also working on this (among other things) in MoveIt Studio. At the moment, MoveIt Studio has a lot of these panels you mentioned, like trajectory previewing, 3D scenes, camera feeds, etc., but not so much on “bespoke panels” as Foxglove advertises.
Without knowing a lot about your exact problem, I would say that RViz is on one end of customizable but you do all the work, MoveIt Studio is on the other (for now), and Foxglove is somewhere in the middle.
Either way, it would be great to know more about what you’d like to see or achieve, and we at PickNik are always happy to chat if anything there seems useful to you.
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Thanks for the info, MoveIt Studio also looks awesome! But it appears the full functionality of MoveIt Studio will be given to paying customers and I’m currently only in the market for FOSS solutions.
I’m a long-time rviz user and have only begun tinkering with Foxglove, my initial impression is Foxglove solves a lot of the pain points of rviz such as having way more control over where and how panels are displayed, and it provides a more modern and customizable interface out of the box which is important for the optics of demos. Having data plots easily active in the same window is also nice, and I’ve been told you can interact with data from a ROS system without even having ROS installed, this kind of cross-platform support is difficult to achieve with rviz.
It seems Foxglove has interest in supporting moveit_msgs, so perhaps some of the gaps that I’m currently experiencing will be filled soon, I may look into this myself soon if I have the time. I suppose I was mostly curious if MoveIt developers and/or PickNik had plans to more tightly integrate to Foxglove given the rise in popularity and active development of Foxglove.