Foxglove

Using Foxglove Bridge

The Foxglove bridge is implemented as a C++ node for high performance and low overhead, and allows you to connect to your live ROS 1 and ROS 2 data via the Foxglove WebSocket protocol.

Connect to Foxglove Studio via the Foxglove WebSocket connection to visualize your live robotics data.

Overview

The foxglove_bridge uses the Foxglove WebSocket protocol, a similar protocol to rosbridge, but with the ability to support additional schema formats such as ROS 2 .msg and ROS 2 .idl, parameters, graph introspection, and non-ROS systems. The bridge is written in C++ and designed for high performance with low overhead to minimize the impact to your robot stack.

Installation

The foxglove_bridge package is available for ROS 1 Melodic and Noetic, and ROS 2 Humble and Rolling. Earlier releases of ROS will not be supported due to API design and/or performance limitations. The package can be installed with the following command:

$ sudo apt install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-foxglove-bridge

Configuration

Use parameters to configure your bridge's behavior. These parameters must be set at initialization through a launch file or the command line – they cannot be modified at runtime.

  • port – The TCP port to bind the WebSocket server to. Must be a valid TCP port number, or 0 to use a random port. Defaults to 8765.
  • address – The host address to bind the WebSocket server to. Defaults to 0.0.0.0, listening on all interfaces by default. Change this to 127.0.0.1 to only accept connections from the local machine.
  • tls – If true, use Transport Layer Security (TLS) for encrypted communication. Defaults to false.
  • certfile – Path to the certificate to use for TLS. Required when tls is set to true. Defaults to "".
  • keyfile – Path to the private key to use for TLS. Required when tls is set to true. Defaults to "".
  • topic_whitelist – List of regular expressions (ECMAScript grammar) of whitelisted topic names. Defaults to [".*"].
  • send_buffer_limit – Connection send buffer limit in bytes. Messages will be dropped when a connection's send buffer reaches this limit to avoid a queue of outdated messages building up. Defaults to 10000000 (10 MB).
  • (ROS 1) max_update_ms – The maximum number of milliseconds to wait in between polling roscore for new topics, services, or parameters. Defaults to 5000.
  • (ROS 2) num_threads – The number of threads to use for the ROS node executor. This controls the number of subscriptions that can be processed in parallel. 0 means one thread per CPU core. Defaults to 0.
  • (ROS 2) max_qos_depth – Maximum depth used for the QoS profile of subscriptions. Defaults to 10.

Development

For directions on how to build from source or to contribute to the project, check out the ros-foxglove-bridge GitHub repo.

Additional resources

← Connecting to data: Setting up CORSPanels: Introduction →