Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming - Second Edition

Methodology of building the RViz plugin

Before starting to build this plugin, we should know how to do it. The standard method to build an ROS plugin is applicable for this plugin too. The difference is that the RViz plugin is GUI based. The RViz is written using a GUI framework called Qt, so we need to create a GUI in Qt and, using Qt APIs, we have to get the GUI values and send them to the ROS system.

The following steps describe how this teleoperation RViz plugin is going to work:

1. The dockable panel will have a Qt GUI interface, and the user can input the topic, linear velocity, and angular velocity of teleoperation from the GUI.
2. Collect the user input from GUI using Qt signals and slots, and publish the values using the ROS subscribe-and-publish ...