cartographer_rviz

cartographer_rviz is the RViz integration package for Cartographer (ROS 2). It provides a visualization plugin that displays the map built by Cartographer as a collection of submaps inside RViz.

Cartographer represents the environment as a set of trajectory-local submaps. Each submap stores occupancy information that can be rendered as a grayscale intensity image with an associated alpha (opacity) channel. The plugin fetches per-submap textures from the running Cartographer node and composites them into a single “X-ray” view of the map inside the 3D scene.

Role in the system

This package is a consumer of the other Cartographer packages:

  • It depends on the cartographer core library, which provides the SubmapId type, the SubmapTextures/SubmapTexture rendering data structures, and the submap painting machinery used to produce the textures.

  • It depends on cartographer_ros for the FetchSubmapTextures() helper that queries the Cartographer node over the SubmapQuery service, and on cartographer_ros_msgs for the SubmapList, SubmapEntry, and SubmapQuery messages and service used by that RPC.

  • It is a plugin for rviz_common, rviz_rendering, and rviz_ogre_vendor, which provide the RViz display infrastructure and the OGRE rendering engine.

How it works

  1. The SubmapsDisplay plugin subscribes to the SubmapList topic published by Cartographer.

  2. For every submap in the list, it creates a DrawableSubmap object that owns two OgreSlice objects (one high-resolution and one low-resolution slice).

  3. On every render update, submaps that have a newer metadata version issue an asynchronous SubmapQuery service call through FetchSubmapTextures().

  4. The returned texture is uploaded to OGRE as raw RGB pixel data and drawn as a textured quad in the scene, positioned and oriented by the submap pose.

  5. Submaps are alpha-blended together, and submap opacity fades with the distance between the submap and the tracking frame in the z direction.

Contents

  • Overview — this page.

  • Quickstart — build and usage instructions.

  • File-by-file documentation:

    • Build and package metadata: CMakeLists.txt, package.xml, rviz_plugin_description.xml.

    • Headers under include/cartographer_rviz/: submaps_display.h, drawable_submap.h, ogre_slice.h.

    • Implementations under src/: submaps_display.cpp, drawable_submap.cpp, ogre_slice.cpp.

    • OGRE shader and material files under ogre_media/materials/: glsl120.program, submap.vert, submap.frag, submap.material.

Cross-References

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