dheera/rosboard

What it solves

ROSboard provides a lightweight way to visualize ROS (Robot Operating System) topics through a web browser. It eliminates the need for complex local installations of visualization tools on a client machine, allowing users to monitor a robot's data from any device with a browser, including mobile phones.

How it works

The project runs as a ROS node that hosts a web server using the Tornado framework. It creates a custom websocket bridge that communicates with the robot's ROS system. To ensure compatibility across both ROS1 and ROS2, it uses a shim library called rospy2 that allows the node to be written in ROS1 style while communicating with rclpy in the background for ROS2 systems. The web interface then renders the data using various JavaScript libraries for 2D and 3D visualizations.

Who it’s for

It is designed for robotics developers and researchers who need a mobile-friendly, low-resource way to monitor ROS topics in real-time or play back ROS bags on a desktop.

Highlights

• Cross-Version Compatibility: Works with both ROS1 and ROS2.
• Mobile Friendly: Optimized for viewing robot data on a phone while walking next to the hardware.
• Resource Efficient: Consumes very few resources when idle.
• Extensible: Users can add visualizations for custom data types by adding a single JavaScript file.
• Optimized Data Transfer: Uses lossy compression for large messages like images and point clouds to improve performance over websockets.