Required lcmtypes for visualisation of robot, sensors and plans

[mauricefallon]

To allow the director to minimally operate without the full OH stack, what are the lcmtypes needed to:

• draw the live robot state
• render data - without libbot or maps by publishing a pointcloud_t type in world frame
• make and execute plans

This is with a view towards making an lcmtype repo independent of Drake, pronto, director and OH and, for example, only requiring a minimal ROS-LCM bridge to operate.

[mauricefallon]

@patmarion : you might have seen I started this: https://github.com/openhumanoids/bot_core_lcmtypes It currently contains only the libbot lcmtypes. I want to move most major drc_lcmtypes into it:

• states, lidar, images, planning messages, pointclouds

Question: what set of lcmtypes are needed to achieve what i said previously above?

(Another future goal would be to split up libbot and retire bot2-lcmgl and bot2-vis. And to switch to the maintained version of procman

[patmarion]

draw live robot state: robot_state_t

load robot model: robot_urdf_t

manip plans: robot_plan_w_keyframes_t. But director doesn't actually use the keyframes, the keyframes are empty, so the main dependency is a robot_plan_t. robot_plan_t has extra fields that we don't use in director, such as matlab_data and grasp transitions. Also, robot_plan_with_supports_t is used.

footstep plans: footstep_plan_t and associated messages

Director has lots of lcmtype dependencies when it executes startup.py, for example irobot and robotiq hands, multisense, maps data requests, iris planner, etc.

I created a minimal app to draw robot state, manip plans, pointcloud_t, and image_t. The app imports much more limited set of modules. Those modules import the drc lcmtypes, but this might be a good starting point to edit those modules to limit their lcmtypes to just the bot_core_lcmtypes.

https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/director/pull/199

You can run the minimal app with Atlas v5 and DRC finals log:

directorPython testDrawRobotLog.py -v5

[mauricefallon]

That's awesome, thanks! I'll work with this and add a demo with a pointcloud_t stream. Yes, the plan messages could do with being redesigned - they have a lot of legacy stuff in there.