FYI: ROS-compatible version of Director exists

[mauricefallon]

This is a note to users of Director. We (Oxford Dynamic Robot Systems) have adapted Director to natively compile within the ROS ecosystem:
https://github.com/ori-drs/director

PCL, OpenCV, VTK, Qt and other dependencies use those provided with ROS-land. Recently we updated to Ubuntu 18.04. LCM dependency has been removed.

We use it to operate our ANYmal robot instead of Rviz.

[patmarion]

Thanks for the notice! I will take a look.

I appreciate the need for a fork so that you can merge PRs as needed. I wonder if you see the new work eventually coming back to Director master branch, or if the fork will become custom tailored to your project?

[patmarion]

By the way, in case it is useful to you, there is a little more ROS code that I wrote that landed in director/master but probably after you had forked. The code is here:

53ce0fb#diff-ffb2d4bdee542b713bd971ea3676c6db

[patmarion]

The code in that commit shows how to create new director libraries, including python wrapping, in the catkin_ws subdir, without needing to add ROS code to the core director code in src/app

[mauricefallon]

Hi Pat,
I don't have any plan to merge back to master right now. That said the folder structure is unchanged and the ROS changes are kept in a separate module - to keep it from infecting the core of director:
https://github.com/ori-drs/vtk_ros
Those are python-wrapped and loaded at runtime.

This vtk_ros module subscribes to and provides vtkPolyData from point clouds, images and depth images:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/o3fxxifj73v38ie/rough_terrain.mp4?dl=0
But work is needed to make this more general and reusable (beyond the sensors on ANYmal)

A version of the DRC-era Director compiles (or could easily) without a ROS dependency at present.

We have an add-on repo ('director_anymal') which adapts the core Director app with UI components specific to ANYmal - all of which is runtime imported python.
Most of our development is outside of the director repo and in that repo. My model is that the core director will not be robot specific but would be skinned for a particular robot or application.

In brief, the question is "who would use this variant of Director?".

For us, Director must have a straightforward catkin build environment - cross platform compatibility is not important to us. It's also not Drake dependent anymore - FK and URDF parsing is now from ROS tools. We don't use any exotic optimal solvers (snopt, gurobi)