At Lumin Robotics we often feel the need for having better tools for debugging the ROS setup of our robot on the console, e.g., over ssh. Typically the things we need are already available in RQT such as the TF tree view, listing topics, and checking their bandwidth and of course, on the console these things are also already available via rostopic, rosrun tf .., etc… But we were looking for something that was easier to navigate and also allowed us to debug the TF tree on the console.
That’s why we started working on ros-blessed, a very small tool that uses rosnodejs and blessed to provide similar functionality to RQT but on the console. Below you can see a demo of what’s already implemented.
It’s already coming in handy almost daily, but before we develop this much further we’d like to get some feedback from others. Is this useful? Does something like this already exist and we just didn’t find it? Which features do you think would be most useful to add in addition to what’s already mentioned in the to-do list?
If you want to try it out, just run
sudo npm install -g ros-blessed
ros-blessed
We’d appreciate your feedback.
