Visualization
Lichtblick offers a comprehensive suite of visualization tools to help you analyze and interpret your robotics data effectively.
To begin visualizing your data, connect to a data source and open a panel.
Open Data Source:
- Click "Open data source" in the left-hand menu.
- Choose from available options: live data or local file.
Opening a Panel:
- Click "Add panel" in the dashboard or left-hand menu.
- Select the desired panel type (e.g., 3D, Raw Message, Image).
Connecting to data
- open a native ROS 1 connection
- connect to a Velodyne LIDAR hardware
- load local URDF and mesh resources in your 3D panel using package:// prefixed in the URLs
Extensions
- Install via registry
- Install locally
Lichtblick's interface is designed for intuitive navigation:
App Menu: Connect to a data source, toggle sidebars, or access resources.
Add Panel: Add a new panel to your current layout.
Layout Menu: Save your workspace view as a layout and share it with teammates.
Left Sidebar: Edit panel settings, view data source topics, and troubleshoot connection issues.
Right Sidebar: Set layout-wide variables, view playback metrics.
Panel sidebar
Edit settings for any selected panel
Topics sidebar
View all topics available in the data source, along with their data types and message rates
Problems sidebar
See a list of playback errors to troubleshoot
Variables sidebar
set layout-wide variables that can be used in different panels with the message path syntax
Lichtblick supports Windows, macOS, and Linux on both web and desktop platforms.
For the web application, use Chrome v111 or later.
For the desktop application, download the latest version for your operating system - check our latest release.
When visualizing local or remote data files, you can navigate their contents using the playback controls.
Lichtblick orders and plays messages based on their log time. Log time typically refers to when the message was recorded but can be set to the timestamp that best reflects the reality you wish to visualize for time-critical signals. It's important to choose your log times carefully and consider sources of time skew such as network latency, batching, and buffering.
Robotics data is often associated with other timestamps, in addition to the log time. The Plot and State Transitions panels can be configured to order data using alternative timestamp fields:
Lichtblick optimizes how it loads complex robotics data for more streamlined seeking and playback.
Message "lookback"
When seeking to an arbitrary point in your loaded data, it's unlikely that every topic you are visualizing has a message at exactly the time you jumped to. To ensure that your layout still displays reasonable data, Lichtblick performs a "lookback" on your data. It looks for the most recent message on each subscribed topic, ensuring that even when seeking to an arbitrary point, Lichtblick will still display reasonable data for all the panels in your layout.
Latched Topics
By default, ROS 1 .bag files, MCAP files, and Lichtblick data streams will play back using message latching. When seeking within your data, Lichtblick fetches the last message on all subscribed topics, even if they occurred multiple minutes before your seek location. Every panel in the layout will then automatically display the last data it saw for that topic, even if that data is infrequently published or was not published at that exact moment in time. Message latching allows panels to accurately display data from infrequently published topics, even while seeking around to multiple points in your data at random.
Preloading
While most Lichtblick panels display just the most recent message for a given topic, others like the Plot and Map panels benefit from visualizing messages across the data's entire time range. Preloading data allows these panels to access all their historical data throughout playback, making it easier to spot anomalies, summarize robot behavior, and recognize trends and patterns.
Even panels that visualize their most recently seen data can benefit from preloading. For example, the 3D panel preloads its transform messages to accurately position its markers. Robots often have many coordinate frames (e.g., joints of a robot arm, cameras on a self-driving car), each with their own markers. To render markers from different frames in a single 3D scene, the panel needs to use transforms to calculate the position of these visual elements in a common coordinate space. Since transforms accumulate and update over time, preloading ensures that the 3D panel has access to all necessary transform data for accurate visualization.
Space - pause or play
shift + ⬅️ - seek backward 10ms
shift + ➡️ - seek forward 10 ms
⬅️ - seek backward 100ms
➡️ - seek forward 100ms
Alt + ⬅️ - seek backward 500ms
Alt + ➡️ - seek forward 500ms
Lichtblick requires incoming messages to conform to specific structures for proper visualization. Utilizing schemas allows you to fully leverage the platform's built-in visualizations.
Supported Formats
- Protobuf
- JSON schema
- ROS 1
- ROS 2
- TypeScript
- FlatBuffers
If you've already developed custom messages, you can transform them into Lichtblick-supported schemas using a message converter extension.