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New in Groovy (also builds against fuerte)

Introduction

rqt is a software framework of ROS that implements the various GUI tools in the form of plugins. One can run all the existing GUI tools as dockable windows within rqt! The tools can still run in a traditional standalone method, but rqt makes it easier to manage all the various windows on the screen at one moment.

You can run any rqt tools/plugins easily by:

$ rqt

$ rosrun rqt_gui rqt_gui

that shows a GUI where you can choose any available plugins on your system.

Users can create their own plugins for rqt with either Python or C++. Over 20 plugins (as of Feb 2013) have already been created and more are slated for development.

rqt supercedes the former GUI tools of ROS rxtools, which now is deprecated since ROS groovy.

rqt components structure

rqt consists of three (+1) metapackages:

• rqt - core modules. rqt plugin developers barely needs to pay attention.

• rqt_common_plugins - ROS backend tools suite that can be used on/off robot runtime.

• rqt_robot_plugins - Tools for interacting robots during their runtime.

  • rqt_pr2_dashboard - Robot specific (PR2). Temporarily excluded from other metapackages due to building issue

Required environment

• Supported Qt version:

  • As of March 2013 and until ROS Jade all rqt pkgs are tested with Qt 4.8.

  • In ROS Kinetic the minimum Qt version was updated to Qt 5.3

• (To be clarified) Tested OS and its version, and Window System:

  • Ubuntu: See REP-3 for the supported OS.

  • Mac OSX: Being tested.

Advantage of rqt framework

Compared to building your own GUIs from scratch...

• Standardized common procedures for GUI (start-shutdown hook, restore previous states).
• Dockable multiple widgets in a single window (no need to open multiple windows)

• Easily turn your existing Qt widgets into rqt plugin.

• Expect good support at answers.ros.org (ROS community website for the questions) since rqt developers are active!

From system architecture's perspective,

• Support multi-platform (basically wherever Qt and ROS run) and multi-language (Python, C++)

• Manageable lifecycle: rqt plugins using common API makes maintainance & reuse easier

See also

• Brief overview of rqt (from an intern completion blog post)

Instructions

Installation

User Documentation

1. User Guide

2. Available Plugins

Tutorials

Assistance & Contribution

Community

• rqt SIG e-mailing list (superseding old rqt (aka ROS GUI) list)

• Questioin-Answer threads (this link only navigates to rqt tag. There could be many rqt_** tags).

Enhancement, issue report

• For new tool idea, open a ticket at rqt's general bugtracker and describe the usecase.

  • Opening up a conversation in ros-users mailinglist might be a good idea too, but should better be saved for the discussion about the tools with larger size (it's up to you what "larger" means).

• For enhancement request / issue report, open a ticket at the corresponding bugtrackers.

  • rqt framework

  • pkgs under rqt_common_plugins

  • pkgs under rqt_robot_plugins

Design & development

Official decision process

• API review (Jun 2012)

• Concept development (Sep 2011) (by 4 D's)

Links to discussions

• Comparison with wxWidgets (Dec 2012)

• (Probably) the very first public discussion among community (Oct 2010)

Github policy for rqt plugins

There's a policy for the development repositories of rqt_common_plugins and rqt_robot_plugins (Related discussion):

• Development happens on the branch groovy-devel. We use that as master branch.

• Releases are made from that branch into Groovy and Hydro at the same time with the same version.
• As soon as new Hydro-only features are upcoming a new branch hydro-devel will be created which than has to level the minor version for future releases