Rviz2

Lets learn about RViz2, the ROS Visualisation tool

By Kevin McAleer,    2 Minutes

What is RViz2?

RViz2 is a powerful, user-friendly visualization tool that allows you to explore and analyze data in 3D. It is capable of displaying a variety of objects including robots, cameras, geometry, point clouds, and more. RViz2 is an open source tool that is available for free and is compatible with the ROS (Robot Operating System) platform.

How can we use RViz2?

We can use RViz2 to display the data from our LiDAR, and then take this further by adding in extra nodes such as the Mapping and Navigation nodes from the SLAM Toolkit.

RViz2 is included in the full desktop version of ROS2, initially we only used the core version of ROS2. Its easy to change this, in the dockerfile you can change the line:

FROM ros:humble-ros-core-jammy

to the line:

FROM ros:humble-ros-desktop-jammy

Rebuild Docker Container

We need to rebuild the docker-container so that it now has the settings.

• Rebuild the container - From the Raspberry Pi terminal, type:

docker-compose build --no-cache
docker-compose up -d

Console into the container

Lets test out RViz2.

• launch Bash in Container - From the Raspberry Pi terminal, type:

docker exec -it docker-full_ros2_1 bash

Launch Rviz2

• launch RViz2 - From the Raspberry Pi terminal, type:

rviz2

RViz should now open within the Raspberry Pi OS - this is because the container is outputing its X11 graphics commands to the Host (the Raspberry Pi OS).