3D dive log playback

Overview

Dive logs hold everything a vehicle recorded, but a raw log is hard to reason about after the fact. Engineers and scientists want to see what the vehicle did, not read a table of it.

I wrote ROS 2 and RViz Docker images that ingest vehicle logs and play them back as a 3D representation of the navigation during a dive. The containers keep the playback environment reproducible across machines.

The playback also shows readouts of vehicle state data and science readings alongside the 3D view, so a track can be read together with the measurements taken along it.

The tool is open source. The images are published on Docker Hub as mbari/tethystales.

Tools

ROS 2, RViz, Docker.