Mavros Offboard example: Visualization of path in rviz

Vrinda · October 25, 2018, 2:32pm

Hello !
I was curious to see the relat time plot of the path of the quadcopter in gazebo. I looked into rviz, however I am unable to view the robot model in rviz. Has anyone done this ? I needed a starting point. I have been following the tutorial mentioned http://gazebosim.org/tutorials?tut=drcsim_visualization&cat=. However installing drcsim is giving me errors, since I am using ROS kinetic. Please can someone help me regarding this ?
Thanks much !

baumanta · October 31, 2018, 9:15am

Here is the link on how to setup SITL gazebo for PX4: https://dev.px4.io/en/simulation/gazebo.html
I hope that helps!

Vrinda · October 31, 2018, 12:51pm

Thanks much @baumanta ! I tried that, however I was unable to do it.

baumanta · October 31, 2018, 2:04pm

Ok, it is not really clear to me where you are stuck. Does SITL work for you? Can you start the simulation and see the fcu frame moving in rviz? If not, what did you try and how did it fail?

Vrinda · October 31, 2018, 2:28pm

Hello @baumanta ! Yes SITL works for me ! I just want to visualize the trajectory of the quad in rviz. Here is the screenshot of my rviz screen. I see nothing, do I have to attach a marker at my frame to visualize it. Thanks much for your time on this !

Vrinda · October 31, 2018, 2:29pm

Please note that the quadcopter is flying in gazebo.

baumanta · October 31, 2018, 4:23pm

ok, that looks good so far. Now you only have to add rostopics. In RVIZ go to ADD -> by topic and add what you want to see (e.g. /mavros/local_position/pose)

Vrinda · October 31, 2018, 4:51pm

Thanks much @baumanta ! I tried that earlier, however I do not see anything in rviz. Here is the rviz screen,

baumanta · November 1, 2018, 8:39am

It seems like the simulation is running correctly. But you seem to have a frame problem as you can see in the transform error. I suggest you try a few different Global Options -> Fixed frames. And maybe try:

rosrun tf view_frames
evince frames.pdf

This might give us an idea, why it is complaining about a frame called “map”
Because the topic /mavros/local_position/pose should be published in local_origin frame and you set the fixed frame to fcu. It is not clear to me from that why Rviz is looking for a frame called “map”.

Vrinda · November 1, 2018, 12:58pm

Thanks much @baumanta ! Yesterday I used map as my fixed frame, and was able to view pose from mavros. However global status had a warning sign. (It goes green only when I choose fcu as my fixed frame). There is some problem with frames. I will check and keep you posted.