Foxglove Bridge

Use the Foxglove Bridge to visualize your live ROS 1 or ROS 2 data over Foxglove WebSocket or remote access.

Overview

The Foxglove Bridge connects your ROS stack to Foxglove. It uses a protocol similar 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 implemented as a C++ node and is designed for high performance with low overhead.

Getting started

Follow the ROS 1 or ROS 2 getting started guide to install the bridge and connect Foxglove to your robot.

For the full list of configuration parameters, see the ROS 1 configuration reference or the ROS 2 configuration reference.

Remote access

The Foxglove Bridge supports remote access for ROS 1 and ROS 2, allowing organization members to visualize and teleoperate the device through the Foxglove platform without direct network access.

To enable remote access, set remote_access to true and provide a device token via the FOXGLOVE_DEVICE_TOKEN environment variable. Once started, the device appears on the Devices page and can be connected to remotely.

ROS 2

FOXGLOVE_DEVICE_TOKEN=fox_dt-... \
  ros2 launch foxglove_bridge foxglove_bridge_launch.xml \
  remote_access:=true

ROS 1

For ROS 1, remote access is provided by the foxglove-bridge-ros1 package, distributed as a Docker image. Remote access requires a newer glibc than the Ubuntu 20.04 base that ROS 1 Noetic runs on, so the image bundles its own Noetic environment. Your robot needs no changes: the bridge container connects to your existing ROS 1 stack over normal ROS connections.

docker run --rm --network host \
  -e ROS_MASTER_URI=http://localhost:11311 \
  -e ROS_HOSTNAME=localhost \
  -e FOXGLOVE_DEVICE_TOKEN=fox_dt-... \
  us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/foxglove-images/images/foxglove_bridge:ros-noetic-v0.0.0 \
  rosrun foxglove_bridge foxglove_bridge _remote_access:=true

Replace v0.0.0 with a valid release version. To run the bridge on a different host than your robot, point ROS_MASTER_URI at the robot's ROS master and set ROS_HOSTNAME to an address of the bridge host that the robot can reach.

Parameter	Description	Default
remote_access	Enable remote access through the Foxglove platform	false
device_token	Device token used to authenticate the device. If not set, falls back to the FOXGLOVE_DEVICE_TOKEN environment variable. Prefer the environment variable: a token passed as a parameter is visible to other processes on the ROS network (via the ROS 1 parameter server or the ROS 2 parameter services), while the environment variable is only visible to the bridge process
video_transcode_topic_denylist	ROS 2 only. Topics matching these regexes (ECMAScript) are delivered as data instead of transcoded to video, for images whose pixels must not pass through lossy video (such as depth images)	['.*/compressedDepth']

System info

The foxglove_bridge can collect system information with CPU, memory, swap, and operating system details, and forward that data over to the Foxglove application via the /foxglove_bridge/sysinfo topic.

You can configure this by setting the sysinfo parameters when starting the bridge:

ROS 2

ros2 launch foxglove_bridge foxglove_bridge_launch.xml \
  sysinfo:=true \
  sysinfo_topic:=/foxglove_bridge/sysinfo \
  sysinfo_refresh_interval:=500

ROS 1

docker run --rm --network host \
  -e ROS_MASTER_URI=http://localhost:11311 \
  -e ROS_HOSTNAME=localhost \
  us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/foxglove-images/images/foxglove_bridge:ros-noetic-v0.0.0 \
  rosrun foxglove_bridge foxglove_bridge \
    _sysinfo:=true \
    _sysinfo_topic:=/foxglove_bridge/sysinfo \
    _sysinfo_refresh_interval:=500

Parameter	Description	Default
sysinfo	Whether the system info publisher is enabled	true
sysinfo_topic	The topic name the metrics are published on	/foxglove_bridge/sysinfo
sysinfo_refresh_interval	The interval (in milliseconds) over which metrics are refreshed. Clamped to a min of 200ms	500

See the SystemInfoPublisher docs for details on what metrics are published.

Development

To build from source or to contribute to the project, check out the foxglove-sdk GitHub repo for the ROS 2 bridge, or the foxglove-bridge-ros1 repo for the ROS 1 bridge.