Hi All,
I’ve been recently interested in deploying topic visualizations in the terminal. Following up on my previous work on Terminal PCL Visualizer, I’ve been continuing to explore terminal based visualization for robotics and I have built a complementary project: TViz.
While the earlier work focused on high performance point cloud rendering, this repo is a more modular and extensible framework for visualising broader robot state directly in the terminal. The idea is to rethink how we interact with robotics systems in resource constrained or headless environments, where traditional GUI tools are not always practical.
Terminal RViz is designed to support multiple display types and provide a structured, RViz like experience, but entirely within the CLI. This opens up possibilities for remote debugging, lightweight deployments, and tighter integration with developer workflows.
It helps bring visibility to alternative tooling approaches in the ROS 2 ecosystem and as always, I’m open to feedback and collaboration to help develop this toolkit further for other RViz plugins.
You can find the TViz package here: GitHub - nathanshankar/terminal_rviz · GitHub
You can find the PCL visualizer (has splatting implemented to generate denser views of objects) here: GitHub - nathanshankar/terminal_pcl_visualizer · GitHub
ros2 robotics #OpenRobotics cli #AutonomousSystems #Linux #3DVisualization