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ROS Foxglove bridge

Use the ROS Foxglove bridge to visualize your live ROS 1 or ROS 2 data via the Foxglove WebSocket connection.

The Foxglove bridge connects your ROS stack to Foxglove via the Foxglove WebSocket protocol. It is implemented as a C++ node for high performance and low overhead.

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

Launch​

Start the foxglove_bridge from your ROS workspace using roslaunch in ROS 1 or ros2 launch in ROS 2. Optional configurations and their default values are below.

$ ros2 launch foxglove_bridge foxglove_bridge_launch.xml

Add foxglove_bridge to your launch file if you plan to use it anytime your robot is online.

Configuration​

Configure bridge behavior with the following parameters. Set parameters at initialization via 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 Messages will be dropped when a connection's send buffer reaches this limit to avoid a queue of outdated messages building up.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 only:

  • max_update_ms – Maximum number of milliseconds to wait in between polling roscore for new topics, services, or parameters. Defaults to 5000.

ROS 2 only:

  • num_threads – 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.
  • max_qos_depth – Maximum depth used for the QoS profile of subscriptions. Defaults to 10.

Development​

To build from source or to contribute to the project, check out the ros-foxglove-bridge GitHub repo.