Announcing Visual Tools, ROS Control Boilerplate, Utilities

I'm happy to announce the release a bunch of packages I've worked on and found useful over the years. They have been used in mine and other's research at the University of Colorado Boulder, as well as in the Amazon Picking Challenge and other external projects for companies. They all have decent documentation in their README.md file, example launch files, utilize Travis CI, and have been released in Indigo and Jade. As always, please help in making them even better!

Ever wanted to make visualizing data in Rviz easier? rviz_visual_tools provides a ton of helper functions for visualizing different types of shapes and data in Rviz in an efficient way.

Want to visualize multiple RobotStates while also showing different trajectories, trajectory lines, and grasp positions? moveit_visual_tools contains all the functionality of rviz_visual_tools while also providing visualization of many of the MoveIt! data types. It also makes it easy to add collision objects to your planning scene.

Add to the functionality of Rviz and MoveIt! visual tools with even more specialized features for OMPL data types and for introspecting your sampling-based geometric OMPL planners. ompl_visual_tools is specially good for working in 2D or 3D spaces.

Want to get started with ros_control for your next robot/robot upgrade? ros_control_boilerplate contains lots of working example code for the RRBot (as seen in Gazebo) as well as many helper utilities such as loading joint limits from rosparam and URDF, recording trajectories to file, playing back from file, etc.

moveit_sim_controller is a pass-through non-physics based simulator for quickly testing your ros_control robot offline. It also allows you to load your robot's initial state from a SRDF (semantic robot description format) state instead of the default 0's state.

Don't want to worry about more specialized calibration techniques for moving your /tf transforms to different locations? tf_keyboard_cal lets you use your computer keyboard to tweak the 6 dof transform of a frame quickly and intuitively, and even load/save the settings from file.

The package rosparam_shortcuts provides lots of helper functions for all sorts of datatypes to be easily loaded from parameter server with good user feedback if the parameter is missing. This package enforces the philosphy that there should be no default parameters - everything must be defined by the user in yaml files (or launch files or where ever) otherwise your program should not run.

I hope these are helpful to your robotics projects!