Author

• Welin 2018.02.23
• modified in 2018.10.31
• update in 2021.10.14

Overview

In the project, so many ways are provided to implement ROS-Qt GUI, namely rqt, such as qt4, qt5, pyqt4. Also ROS could be treated as a open-source library to extend some other module by using CMAKE, not just using catkin_make/rosbuild, to make the development more flexible.

Description

• In this project, three approaches are provided to implement ROS&Qt GUI and another two projects for PyQt GUI.
• In the test_gui package, it just modified the example in catkin_create_qt_pkg depending on qt_build using Qt4 library.
• In the rqt_mypkg package, it is the C++ rqt_plugin test depending on rqt_gui_cpp.
• In the qt_ros_test package, it combines ROS with Qt5 library.

Remeber to add Qt install environment to the CMAKE_PRFIX_PATH such as set(Qt5_DIR "path/to/cmake/Qt5") before find_package(Qt5 REQUIRED COMPONENTS Core Gui Widgets) if you encounter the following problem.

The above three are written in C++ programmer. The following two below are written in Python.

• In the ros_pyqt package, it uses PyQt (PyQt4) to implement the GUI.
• In the pyqt_gui package, it uses PyQt and python_qt_binding to implement the GUI.

In the qt4rosgui package, it uses Qt4 libraries to implement the ROS-GUI NOT depends on qt-ros package (namely command catkin_create_qt_pkg).

In the librviz_test package, it uses librviz to build a visualizer tool for display using Qt4.

For more complicated examples, please see the package dyn_cfg_gui or ros_cv_gui, it is the implementation for rqt_reconfigure and some image processing by using OpenCV and Qt5. Also see ROS_dynamic_reconfig, ros_cv_qt_gui and ros_opencv_pro for detail.

TODO

    $ mkdir -p catkin_ws/src
    $ cd catkin_ws/src

git clone the project from the corrent URL

    $ cd ..
    $ catkin_make
    $ source devel/setup.bash

Then, rosrun test_gui test_gui or rosrun qt_ros_test qt_ros_test_node or rosrun qt4rosgui qt4rosgui_node. The effect is below:

To run the rqt_mypkg, just open rqt (rosrun rqt_gui rqt_gui), and the "rqt first C++ plugin" could be found in the Plugins menu. The effect is below:

To run ros_pyqt or pyqt_gui, just using the command python ros_pyqt or python pyqt_gui. The effect is below:

If you have a mobile robot such as TurtleBot or else, the slam navigation status could be shown as below. Just run ros vizlib_test vizlib_test_node.

Using rosrun dyn_cfg_gui dyn_cfg_gui command, the effect is shown below.

The ros&opencv example is also provided as shown below.

    $ rosrun ros_cv_gui ros_cv_gui_node

Especially,

the ros_cmake package could be separated in a individual directory, not using catkin_make/rosbuild.

    $ mkdir build
    $ cd build
    $ cmake ..
    $ make
    $ ./ros_cmake     #the executable program

The effect is shown below, the topic has been subscribed. Remember to open roscore at first.

Enjoy!