bagtube

A simple bag/live topic player for ROS2. It is intended to be used for remote monitoring of robot operation.

Server

The basic mechanism of bagtube is republishing of live/bag topics to new topics on demand, so that a remote communication protocol (e.g. Zenoh) can be configured to stream only the new topics, sparing the bandwidth during periods when robot activity is of no interest for the user.

Features

• Livestreaming ROS2 topics on demand (i.e. toggling republish on/off) via enable_livestream service
• Recording bags via record_bag action
• Calling additional SetBool services on start/stop of recording/livestreaming (specified via toggle_input_nodes_running_services parameter, see example config)
• Listing recorded bags via get_bag_list service
• Editing bag name and deleting bags via edit_bag service
• Limiting total used storage via max_total_size_gb parameter
• Playback via play_bag action
• Playback control via control_playback service (play/pause/seek/set_rate)
• Sending preview snapshots after each seek (optional if snapshot_bag_stamp is specified in control_playback service)

Client

The client is a simple RViz2 panel as an example of controlling bagtube server. It is basically a "video player/recorder" for ROS2 topics.

Example

Installation:

sudo apt install ros-iron-ros-base ros-iron-rviz2 ros-iron-demo-nodes-cpp ros-iron-usb-cam
cd ~/my_ws/
. /opt/ros/iron/setup.bash
colcon build --symlink-install

Running server and rviz2 with bagtube panel example:

. ~/my_ws/install/setup.bash
ros2 launch bagtube chatter_camera.launch.py

Note: the annoying 'Hello world' logging node is just an example that bagtube is not only a video player, but it can be configured for any number of topics of any types (see config). You can see the streamed messages (during livestream/playback) via:

. /opt/ros/iron/setup.bash
ros2 topic echo /chatter_stream