Merge pull request #400 from una-auxme/378-document-rviz

Add RViz research

doc/research/paf24/general/rviz.md

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+# Research about RViz
+
+**Summary:** This page contains information on how to use RViz and how it is integrated into the project.
+
+- [General overview](#general-overview)
+- [Displays panel](#displays-panel)
+  - [Display types](#display-types)
+    - [Camera](#camera)
+    - [Image](#image)
+    - [PointCloud(2)](#pointcloud2)
+    - [Path](#path)
+- [RViz configuration](#rviz-configuration)
+- [Sources](#sources)
+
+## General overview
+
+Description from the git repository: **"rviz is a 3D visualizer for the Robot Operating System (ROS) framework."**
+
+It can be used to visualize the state of the car in real-time.
+
+- The Visualizer always has a 3D View panel in the middle. This is where all 3D data, from for example lidar and radar sensors, is shown.
+- The most important panel is *Displays*. It is used to configure what data is displayed.
+- All other panels are available under *Panels* in the menu bar.
+- Panels can be regrouped by dragging their title bar.
+
+## Displays panel
+
+The *Displays* panel contains a list all the currently visualized data-displays and allows changing their settings and visibility.
+
+The default configuration currently displays the center camera, lidar and radar point clouds, planned path and segmentation image.
+
+Individual data-displays can be added and removed in the lower menu bar of the panel. Adding works in two ways:
+
+- By type: The user then has to manually set up the settings including the topic which the display visualizes.
+- By topic: In the *By topic* tab, RViz lists all available ros topics and allows to easily add them for visualization.
+
+Do not forget to give the data-display a proper name when adding it (Renaming with F2 is also possible).
+
+### Display types
+
+There are several display types that can be added.
+Depending on the type there are different settings available for the display.
+The *Topic* setting controls from which ros topic the displays gets its data.
+
+The most important display types are:
+
+#### Camera
+
+Shows an image from a camera. Allows overlaying other data on top of the image including *Path* and *PointCloud2* (*Visibility* setting)
+
+Adding a camera also adds a new panel with the camera image.
+
+#### Image
+
+Shows an image. Also works for camera topics.
+
+Adding an image also adds a new panel with the image.
+
+#### PointCloud(2)
+
+Shows a point cloud in the 3D View
+
+#### Path
+
+Shows a path in the 3D View
+
+## RViz configuration
+
+RViz can be fully configured with the GUI. The settings may then be saved with *File->Save Config*.
+
+The default configuration file is located at [code/agent/config/rviz_config.rviz](../../../../code/agent/config/rviz_config.rviz)
+and this path is defined in [code/agent/launch/agent.launch](../../../../code/agent/launch/agent.launch). It can be changed to use a different default config when running the leaderboard.
+
+## Sources
+
+<https://github.com/ros-visualization/rviz>
+
+<http://wiki.ros.org/rviz/UserGuide>