Only released in EOL distros:
Package Summary
Record the joint_states and/or the mobile changes (via tf) of a ROS system as three.js animation
- Maintainer status: maintained
- Maintainer: Jonathan Hechtbauer <jonathan.hechtbauer AT ipa.fraunhofer DOT de>
- Author: Jonathan Hechtbauer <jonathan.hechtbauer AT ipa.fraunhofer DOT de>
- License: BSD
Look at me!
... catch more attention with the tool ...
RecordIt
"An animation is worth a thousand lines of markdown."
The RecordIt tool allows to record any ROS application. The resulting 3D animation can be visualized in the web or as well be converted into a GIF.
Further examples
See source code of application
Use cases
- Eye-catcher for ROS applications
- Inspect CI test
- Visual benchmarking
Create a 3D web animation
The tool records the motion of the robot and saves it into a file. In order to reduce the recorded data it does not use a fixed rate but key frames.
During a running application the internal and external motions are extracted from the ROS topics /joint_states and /tf respectively. The topics can be throttled by rate and by change to reduce the recorded key frames.
The tool can either be used in automatic mode which records as long as the node is running; or in manual mode, triggered via ROS services or through a RViZ gui.
The recorded robot movements are saved in the JSON Object format which can be directly feed into Three.js, a cross-browser library to display animated 3D graphics. In combination with the urdf-loaders library, which imports the ROS robot robot description into a Three.js scene, one can visualize the animated robot in the web browser. The resulting web page can easily be hosted on Github Pages or any other web server.
Convert to a GIF
With only once click the animation can be converted to a GIF which can be used e.g. for a README or a presentation.