Create GUI to speed-up experiments on the robot

[andreadelprete]

To carry out experiments on the robot we are currently relying we connect to the python interpreter (running on the robot) through a rosservice, which gives us a python console, but without auto-completion. This makes the experiments quite slow because we struggle to remember the names of the signals and the commands of the different entities, so we have constantly to use the methods displaySignals and commands to check the names.

Here are a few features for a GUI to use with dynamic graph, which could be an extension of rqt_dynamic_graph:

• python console with auto-completion.
• see a list of all available entities
• clicking on an entity shows the list of its signals (divided by input, output) and commands
• clicking on a signal shows its value and time
• clicking on a signal opens a plot for that signal
• clicking on a signal creates a ROS topic that we can later use for plotting with rqt_plot
• clicking on a signal we can set its new value using the smooth_set_signal function
• clicking on a command shows its documentation
• show a graph representing the entities and their connections that the user can rearrange (for the graph we could start from rqt_graph)
• show the viewer with the robot at its current state
• show the current and torque percentage (w.r.t. their max) at each joint
• buttons to start/stop dynamic graph and the low-level motor/sensor access

For the list of entities, signals and commands, we could start from the layout of rqt_logger_level, which you can see here.

[andreadelprete]

Here it is another interesting project we may take inspiration from: https://github.com/PhilReinhold/liveplot

[andreadelprete]

I just found a multi-plot version of rqt-plot: https://github.com/ethz-asl/rqt_multiplot_plugin

[andreadelprete]

And this is a version plotting a histogram: https://github.com/raultron/online_histogram

[andreadelprete]

I worked a bit on rqt_dynamic_graph so now we have a python terminal with auto-completion. When used on an entity it shows also the signals and the commands of that entity (which are normally not shown).