RViz / RViz2

ROS's built-in 3D visualization tool for viewing a robot model, coordinate frames, and sensor data.

RViz is ROS's official 3D visualization tool; the ROS 2 version is called RViz2. It subscribes to ROS topics and draws the robot model (from a URDF), TF coordinate frames, lidar point clouds, camera images, planned paths, and custom markers all in the same 3D scene. It doesn't do any simulation itself — its only job is to show what the robot currently believes the world looks like — which makes it the standard tool for debugging sensor calibration, coordinate transforms, and navigation planning. Both MoveIt's and Nav2's interactive interfaces are provided as RViz plugins.

ExampleAdd a RobotModel and a PointCloud2 display in RViz2 to check whether the depth camera's point cloud lines up with the arm model, as a way of verifying hand-eye calibration.

Also called

RViz2, rviz

Related

Robot Operating System 2 · TF / tf2 Transform Tree · Unified Robot Description Format · MoveIt Motion Planning Framework · rqt · Foxglove Studio

Sources

ros2/rviz (GitHub)
ROS Wiki: rviz