Visualization

During exploration, the planner publishes information on a number of topics. These can be visualized using the ROS package rviz. To start the visualizer, type

rosrun rviz rviz

In the sidebar you can add different displays:

• If you installed the octomap plugin as described in the installation instructions, you can select the display MarkerArray and set the topic to /nbvPlanner/octomap_occupied to display the occupancy map.
• Add another display of type TF to display the coordinate frame of the robot relative to the world frame. This indicates the position of the robot.
• Further, you can subscribe a display of type Marker to the topic /inspectionPath to get information about the planning process. It displays the selected space to be explored in a light orange, as well as the tree used for planning with vertices depicted as arrows. Their direction indicates the orientation of the robot, while their length is scaled by the value of their potential exploration gain.

Replace with the namespace of your vehicle, e.g. for the single agent demo scenarios /firefly/nbvPlanner/octomap_occupied and /firefly/inspectionPath and for the multi agent demos add the agent number to firefly, e.g. firefly1.

Alternatively you can add the displays by selecting Add->By Topic and then choose the correct topic.