Hello, ROS community. I’m an old-time ROS developer from Willow Garage. I’ve been away from ROS, for a while, but I’m extremely excited to be back working on open-source robotics tooling again. A few weeks ago we launched our open-source visualization toolkit, Rerun.
Rerun is an SDK for logging data like images, tensors, point clouds, and transforms, paired with an app that builds visualizations around that data. We built Rerun for computer vision and robotics developers to make it easy to debug, explore and understand internal state and data with minimal code.
Rerun came from a desire to solve some of the same problems that originally motivated tools like rosbag and rviz. While one of our goals is to bring the benefits of this kind of tooling to developers outside of ROS, we also hope that ROS developers might find some value here as well. Rerun is written from the ground up in Rust, so it is quite fast and highly portable (it is fully installable as a single python package via pypi and currently runs on Mac, Linux, Windows, and Web).
To give ROS users a feel for Rerun, I put together a very simple Python node that subscribes to some common ROS sensor msgs (Image, PointCloud2, LaserScan, TF2, etc.) and re-logs them to Rerun. This is very much a toy proof-of-concept and not something production ready yet, but gives you a good taste of what can (and what can’t yet) be done.
You can find the ROS guide here, though if you are new to Rerun you might want to start with our Python getting-started guide and viewer walkthrough.
Here’s a screenshot of Rerun in action:
I have also started a Rerun Github Issue to start planning steps toward more native ROS support in the future.
Please feel free to ask any questions you have and I’ll try my best to follow up.