[HN Gopher] Show HN: Web-based visualization for robotics and au...
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Show HN: Web-based visualization for robotics and autonomous
vehicles
Author : amacneil
Score : 77 points
Date : 2021-07-21 20:02 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (foxglove.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (foxglove.dev)
| rckoepke wrote:
| The UI seems very thoughtful, it's clearly a high-quality effort!
| I'm pleasantly surprised by how intuitive it appears at first
| glance. It's one of a vanishingly few examples of a
| "modern"-looking UI with high information density and minimal
| whitespace.
|
| Your team also picked the right hero image for the homepage, and
| I love that it opens up into a YouTube video. It did take me
| awhile to realize that it opens into a video though - the bright
| purple "Play Demo Video" button was treated as spam by my brain.
| I believe that's because the UI in the image is very busy, so
| there are a lot of higher-priority details that I can focus
| on/explore until my internal "look elsewhere on the site" timer
| expires and I scroll off the hero image.
|
| It feels like this does deserve more attention. I suspect people
| who aren't currently working with self-propelled robots may be
| skipping this as they aren't able to envision where they'd use
| it. I'd enjoy exploring it with something like this starter kit,
| though: https://foxglove.dev/blog/building-and-visualizing-your-
| firs...
| rgovostes wrote:
| I hacked on the Foxglove sources a few months ago to add support
| for a visualization I needed, and found the codebase to be top
| notch. My thanks to the team for the project and for being so
| helpful on Slack.
| lukeboi wrote:
| This looks amazing, and I plan to switch to this from Rviz ASAP.
| Out of curiosity, can Foxglove be used with robotic systems that
| don't use ROS?
| jtbandes wrote:
| Thanks for checking it out, and please join our community at
| https://foxglove.dev/community !
|
| For non-ROS systems, we are working on an Extensions API that
| will eventually allow writing code to ingest data from a custom
| source. Currently it's just focused on custom visualizations,
| not the data pipeline piece yet:
| https://foxglove.dev/blog/announcing-foxglove-studio-extensi...
| However, if that's a strong need you have, we can show you
| where to modify the existing code to add a custom data source
| (it's possible, just not cleanly exposed into the extensions
| API yet).
|
| For now, converting your other data to ROS bags first is your
| best bet. Please drop us a note here to discuss your needs in
| more detail:
| https://github.com/foxglove/studio/discussions/1268
| justicezyx wrote:
| Can this be viewed as a visualization of temporal data aligned
| according to their time stamps, and enable human observers to
| detect useful patterns of correlation?
|
| What does the ROS2 support offer? I guess it's to display Ros
| messages or events in the same fashion?
| amacneil wrote:
| Yes - most of our visualizations are aligned with scrubbing
| through time (with a playback bar, similar to Youtube but with
| customizable layouts). Some of the visualizations display data
| over time regardless of the current playback timestamp (e.g.
| plots, maps).
|
| We support connecting to different data sources - ROS 1, ROS 2
| (which has a completely different wire protocol), websockets,
| http, local files (.bag format), and we recently added native
| Velodyne connections (which means Foxglove Studio can also
| replace VeloView). Our data connection support is pluggable, so
| for robotics teams not using ROS it is easy to add support for
| other formats.
|
| Edit - responding to "enable human observers to detect useful
| patterns of correlation": Humans can use this in many ways, it
| depends on what question you are trying to answer. For example,
| to drastically over-simplify - "why did my robot fall down the
| stairs?" - it might be because your sensors were dirty and the
| images or laser scans were bad, it might be because your ML
| incorrectly detected and classified objects, it might be due to
| bad predictions about other objects (probably not for stairs),
| it might be due to a bad planned path, it might be due to poor
| localization. All of these things are easier to diagnose
| visually rather than stepping through code in a traditional
| debugging sense.
| spieswl wrote:
| This looks awesome! I didn't see this in the README, but does
| this gracefully handle ROS bags that aren't properly indexed?
| amacneil wrote:
| We don't handle these very well today, but it's definitely
| something we could improve (and we do have some plans in the
| future for better management of .bag files).
|
| If you have something specific in mind or can share an example
| of a non-properly indexed .bag file you're dealing with, feel
| free to file a Github issue or join us on Slack:
| https://foxglove.dev/community
| sdan wrote:
| Reminds me of https://avs.auto/#/
| amacneil wrote:
| Yes, AVS was open sourced by Uber ATG around the same that we
| open sourced Webviz at Cruise. I haven't used it myself, but
| from memory at the time we exchanged notes with their team, and
| I got the impression that Webviz had much more user-
| configurable layouts, whereas AVS had been designed for
| developers/admins to configure use-case specific layouts. I'm
| not sure whether is continuing to be developed after Aurora
| acquired ATG.
|
| Compared to both projects (AVS and Webviz), Foxglove Studio is
| designed to be extensible, and much more use-case and data-
| source agnostic (for example, we support connecting directly to
| different data sources such as ROS1, ROS2, Websockets, HTTP,
| Velodyne Lidars, and can easily add more).
| amacneil wrote:
| Hi HN!
|
| We are a team of engineers who previously built the
| infrastructure and developer tools for self-driving car
| development at Cruise. We recently launched Foxglove Studio [0]
| as a better way for roboticists to inspect, visualize and debug
| robotics data.
|
| At Cruise, we found existing visualization tools in the robotics
| space (rviz, rqt, etc) extremely lacking. They were typically
| desktop linux (QT) apps, and required the entire autonomous
| vehicle codebase to be checked out and built locally - meaning
| they were inaccessible to teams such as operations, QA, and
| PM/TPMs. In addition, robotics engineers found the workflow of
| downloading 50gb+ log files to their desktop just to triage an
| issue painful.
|
| As a result, we invested heavily in a web-based replacement -
| building a better, faster UI for our robotics engineers, while at
| the same time opening data up to everyone in the organization, so
| that you can share a link to an event in a Slack thread or Jira
| ticket, and others can quickly see the exact same view on their
| own laptop or desktop. Cruise open-sourced part of this work,
| which some of you may be familiar with (Webviz) [1].
|
| Earlier this year, we launched Foxglove Studio, which began as a
| fork of Webviz. Over the past 6 months, we have been extending
| Studio with many new visualization panels, first-class extension
| support, ROS 2 support, an optional desktop app, and internally a
| port from Flow to Typescript. While Studio began as a fork of
| Webviz, we see it as a separate product - we're focused on
| building an extensible, community-first project, and we are
| taking it in a different direction than Webviz (which is tightly
| coupled to many internal Cruise systems, and as such is difficult
| for the community to contribute to).
|
| In the future, we're planning to introduce some paid features
| around team collaboration, data & view sharing, and private
| extensions. However, the core of Foxglove Studio will always
| remain free and open source for the robotics community to use.
|
| Feel free to check out our GitHub [2] and Changelog [3] for more
| details on what we've been up to.
|
| Happy to answer any questions!
|
| [0] https://foxglove.dev/
|
| [1] https://webviz.io/
|
| [3] https://github.com/foxglove/studio
|
| [4] https://github.com/foxglove/studio/releases
| jyothepro wrote:
| Congrats team! this is super cool!
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