ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Visualizing nodes diagnostics

ROS nodes can provide diagnostic information using the diagnostics topic. For that, there is an API that helps to publish diagnostic information in a standard way. The information follows the diagnostic_msgs/DiagnosticStatus message type, which allows us to specify a level (OK, WARN, ERROR), name, message, and hardware ID as well as a list of diagnostic_msgs/KeyValue, which are pairs of key and value strings.

The interesting part comes with the tools that collect and visualize this diagnostic information. At the basic level, rqt_runtime_monitor allows us to visualize the information directly published through the diagnostics topic. Run the example7 node, which publishes information through the diagnostics topic, ...