Visualizing surfaces

mc_surfaces_visualization is a tool that allows you to visualize the surfaces of a robot in mc_rtc GUI or the RViZ application. This is a sub-tool of mc_robot_visualization provided for convenience.

Launching the visualization

The tool is launched as follows:

$ mc_surfaces_visualization[_ros] JVRC1

Note that mc_surfaces_visualization only publishes in mc_rtc gui, while mc_surfaces_visualization_ros publishes in both mc_rtc gui and ros (RViZ). If you installed from debian packages, the ros-free version is provided by mc-rtc-utils while the ros version is provided by ros-<distro>-mc-rtc-utils.

The arguments to the program should be the same as you would use as a MainRobot entry. It can also handle aliases. For example:

# Specify a vector of arguments
$ mc_surfaces_visualization_ros env `rospack find mc_env_description` ground
# Or an alias
$ mc_surfaces_visualization_ros env/ground

After launching an mc_rtc GUI, it should look like this:

In the 3D display:

• Planar surfaces are drawn in green with a blue arrow showing the normal direction of the surface (as seen on the feet in the screenshot);
• Cylindrical surfaces are green cylinders (not seen in the screenshot);
• Gripper surfaces are represented with blue arrows representing the normal direction of the gripper’s points’ frame;

You can easily select which surfaces to display through the interface.