I wanted to share a tool my colleague Felipe Estévez and I have been working on called BirdWatch — a cross-platform GUI for top-level control and runtime management of ROS-based systems. While Felipe initially built it with UAVs in mind, it’s turned out to be useful across a range of robotics platforms.
BirdWatch is designed to streamline common tasks during field testing, deployment, and multi-robot setups by wrapping them into a single, cohesive interface. Features include:
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Define multiple robots and SSH configurations once and reuse them easily
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Launch ROS nodes on remote systems at runtime — no need for static launch files
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Dynamically select which ROS 1/2 topics to record
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Transfer logs or bag files to local SSDs or remote storage
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Monitor and manage live logs from multiple sources
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Launch RViz or QGroundControl directly from the UI
You can find the project here: https://github.com/aau-cns/birdwatch
Would love to hear feedback or suggestions.
