ROS2 support for Zethus
Zethus is an Open Source library for Robot visualization in the browser. Initially developed by Rapyuta Robotics, it provides a web-based solution with 3-D visualization capabilities — similar to RViz. RViz is ROS’ traditional, desktop based visualization tool which is used for the visualization of ROS messages. With Zethus, a user can take advantage of these visualization capabilities anywhere from a web browser.
Zethus works in conjunction with rosbridge_suite to allow ROS message visualization in the web browser. The ROS topics running on the user’s machine are exposed to the browser via websockets. Zethus, along with the underlying Amphion, create suitable 3-D visualizations of supported messages published on these topics.
Up to now, however, Zethus and the underlying Amphion library were not ROS 2 compatible.
As more and more robotics software solutions move from ROS to ROS2, the demand for tools working with ROS2 grows. Over the last month, I, with the support of Wolf Vollprecht from QuantStack, have been working on Zethus and some of it’s dependencies (rosbridge_suite and Amphion) to add support for ROS2. These new adaptations allow Zethus and the underlying software to automatically recognize which version of ROS the user is exposing with rosbridge and visualize ROS2 messages. Quick and easy visualization of ROS messages through a browser is now also possible with ROS2 messages!