Dispatcher - A tool for launching and monitoring health status of ROS2 nodes

About this technology

Overview

This software provides a simple graphical user interface to launch and monitor the health status of multiple ROS2 nodes running locally or on a network. A typical autonomous Robotic Software system consists of many independent applications that communicate with each other via Interprocess Communication (IPC). Launching and monitoring the health status of many disparate modules is difficult, particularly for operators who are unfamiliar with ROS2 command-line tools. This tool provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for operators to launch and monitor the status of ROS2 software modules. The tools enables operators to operate ROS2 testbeds with little or no software development experience.The dispatcher software provides a Qt Widget with buttons dynamically configured from a yaml input file. From the simple user interface, operators can easily start or stop a single node at a time, or all nodes on the bus. Users can also connect to any running node in a detached shell session using tmux.