Zethus - Browser based realtime ROS data visualization

General
1

Hi all,

Rapyuta Robotics team is happy to announce the open-source release of Amphion and Zethus, two javascript libraries to visualize ROS data from remote websocket endpoints in the browser. Zethus is the browser equivalent of RViz, built on top of Amphion. Amphion can be seen as an alternative to ros3djs with enhancements to design and performance.

HOW THE COMMUNITY CAN USE THEM
Zethus
Roboticists familiar with RViz will find it very similar. Just connect to a websocket endpoint and click on Add Visualization.
https://rapyuta-robotics.github.io/zethus/
Developers can also include it in their web applications. Instructions can be found on the Github Wiki

Amphion
Getting started with any visualization only takes a few lines of code.
Syntax for each visualization is available on the Wiki page

EXAMPLES

We extensively use them to build powerful browser-based user interfaces to develop and operate our robotics solutions built around rapyuta.io. Here are some examples for inspiration.

DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITY
Recent past work

We’ve added support for PlanningScene, DisplayTrajectory and a lot of Image encodings. (#31, #32)
We received contributions from our friends for Point, Range and Wrench (#17, #19, #37)
We also made improvements to the performance of PointClouds and Images. (#25, #33)
And rectified bugs in the fixed frame selection. (#30)

Enhancements in progress
The current features in development include support for interactive markers.
We’re working on widgets for Jupyterlab which should see significant additions in the upcoming weeks

We sincerely hope this work helps you to build powerful user interfaces. We will be very happy to hear feedback and welcome any contribution.

CONTRIBUTIONS

We’ll be delighted to receive PRs, suggestions, advice and ideas from the community so we can together make it better.

A good place to start is the Issues section on Github


LONG-TERM VISION

We’re committed to the browser as a medium for ROS visualizations. It is in line with our vision to make robots more accessible. We believe this is just the beginning of ROS based web visualizations.

Best regards,
opensource@rapyuta-robotics.com

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I love all these projects moving alot of the RVIZ tools to the web! I really hope one day (soon) we deprecate rviz in favor of one of them.

I’m curious on your thoughts comparing and contrasting Cruise’s webviz / worldview projects (https://webviz.io/worldview/#/). Obviously by just supporting non-bagged data this is immediately more easy to play with. I’d love to hear your thoughts on each.

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From what I notice about the current state of Webviz and Zethus, they vary on the purpose they were initially built for.

WebViz seems to focus on timeseries data analytics. It has support for graphs and logs. And the panel interface is a good way to anaylze a single dataset across time or to compare two graphs on different panels. But it doesn’t support a robot model.

Zethus is more suited as a visualization than as an analytics tool. It only has a single 3d scene. It provides nothing to see the x coordinate of pose data. The current focus is on the visual representation of the robot itself - robotic arms, agvs, drones etc. To visually see how the robot moves and to interact with it on the 3d interface itself. There are plans to show graphs, rosout and other text logs. And also to support other data sources (ROSBags as one of them) but these features are currently not in active development.

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