Announcing Mapviz, a ROS Visualization Tool

Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is pleased to announce the release of Mapviz, a graphical tool for viewing ROS data from outdoor robotic systems. Mapviz, like Rviz, uses an extensible plugin architecture to display ROS data. The Intelligent Vehicles sections at SwRI developed Mapviz as a tool for our work using ROS in automotive applications. Whereas Rviz is designed for 3D display of data from indoor robots, Mapviz is a 2D (top-down) viewer designed for use with outdoor robots. We look forward to feedback and contributions from others who find Mapviz useful.

Some Features of Mapviz:

* Tile Map background maps from OpenMapQuest (open.mapquest.com) and stamen design (http://maps.stamen.com), with Bing map support coming soon

* Multires Image backgrounds to display custom maps or backgrounds

* Robot marker(s) with custom robot image icons

* Plugins for several ROS message types:

    - sensor_msgs/Disparity

    - gps_common/GPSFix (sensor_msgs/NavSatFix support coming soon)

    - sensor_msgs/Image

    - sensor_msgs/LaserScan

    - visualization_msgs/Marker

    - nav_msgs/Odometry

    - nav_msgs/Path

    - marti_visualization_msgs/Textured Marker (a custom message type for painting image data onto the visualization)

    - TF transforms

Jerry Towler of Southwest Research Institute will give a presentation on Mapviz during Day 2 of ROSCon 2015.

If you want to use Mapviz, it is available on GitHub at http://github.com/swri-robotics/mapviz. Ubuntu Debian installers from the OSRF build farm are up in the shadow-fixed repository for Indigo (Trusty) and Jade (Trusty, Utopic, and Vivid). Additionally, Mapviz can be compiled from source for ROS Jade, Indigo, Hydro, Groovy, and Fuerte. Documentation is available on the ROS wiki at http://wiki.ros.org/mapviz