Hands-On ROS for Robotics Programming

Graphing time series of sensor data with rqt_plot

This is a plugin to visualize two-dimensional data. As we want to see two-dimensional data, let's briefly switch to the distance sensor case study so that we can view the measured distance over time. The process is straightforward: launch the robot, list the topics, and then launch the plugin:

T1 $ roslaunch mygopigo easyDistance.launchT2 $ rostopic list | grep distance_sensorT3 $ rqt_plot

In the upper-left box, write the name of the topic you want to visualize, that is, /distance_sensor/distance as per T2. A window will pop up showing the distance to the obstacle over time:

The green line, ...