Issue with GBP exploration data visualization

[LiYang-Robot]

Hello, GBPlanner is a great work on robot exploration. I would like to use it for experimental comparison with CMU's TARE. I have two questions to consult with you:
1,How can GBPlanner be configured to display curves showing the exploration volume, exploration path, and algorithm runtime over time?
2,During simulation, I noticed that when running Gazebo, the robot's movement is intermittent and not very continuous. The Real Time Factor displayed in Gazebo is around 0.16, and the ROS Elapsed time in rviz is significantly slower compared to real-world time. What modifications can be made to address this issue?
Looking forward to your response, thank you.

[MihirDharmadhikari]

Hi @LiYang-Robot

1. Currently, there is no out-of-the-box way to plot the exploration volume, etc. curves.
   The planner publishes the tsdf_pointcloud which represents the entire mapped volume. You can subscribe to this and the size of the points in this point cloud multiplied by the voxel size will give you the volume in m^3.
   You can find the algorithm run time on the topic gbp_time_log. It contains four values corresponding to the computation time for building the graph, calculating exploration gain, finding the shortest paths in the graph, and remaining processes in the algorithm. The total computation time is the sum of these four values.

2. The low real-time factor is usually due to heavy computation load. Which world are you using? If the current world is very slow, try a simpler world to see if it works.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,
Mihir