After reading and running the code of this chapter, you will have learned how to use many tools that will help you to develop robotic systems faster, debug errors, and visualize your results, so as to evaluate their quality or validate them. Some of the specific concepts and tools you will require in your life as a robotics developer have been summarized here.

Now you know how to include logging messages in your code with different levels of verbosity, which will help you to debug errors in your nodes. For this purpose, you can also use the powerful tools included in ROS, such as the rqt_console interface. Additionally, you can inspect or list the nodes running, topics published, and services provided in the whole system. This includes the inspection of the node graph using rqt_graph.

Regarding the visualization tools, you should now be able to plot scalar data using rqt_plot for a more intuitive analysis of certain variables published by your nodes. Similarly, you can view more complex types (non-scalar ones). This includes images and 3D data using rqt_image_view and rqt_rviz, respectively. Similarly, you can use tools to calibrate and rectify camera images.

Finally, you are now able to record and play back messages in a session thanks to rosbag. You have also learned how to view the contents of a bag file with rqt_bag. This allows you to record the data from your experiments and process them later with your AI or robotics algorithms.