Creating a GUI for ROS

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There is a "handoff" ticket for porting rxplot to Qt, I think this could also be a good starting point to get into ROS GUI development: https://code.ros.org/trac/ros/ticket/3220

Hi, I don't know if you are still interested in programming a gui. If so, maybe we can share experiences. For my thesis I create a Graphical launchfile-editor, which is growing to a development environment. The project is written in C++ and Qt and and is not yet officially released. Visit http://code.google.com/p/rxdeveloper-ros-pkg/ for more information.

You could also use either Qt (C++), GTK+ in C, or GTKmm (a C++ port for GTK+). There are examples of using Qt in the eros stack here. There's also a good example of using GTK+ with ROS here. Personally, I have used GTKmm for my GUI development in ROS.

Additionally, there is a GTK+ port for Python here.

If you are writing in C++ you can use fork and execlp to run a system command such as rosrun or roslaunch:

// this code would be called from the callback method of your button
pid_t pid = 0;
pid = fork();
if (pid < 0) {
  ROS_ERROR("Process failed to fork");
  exit(-1);
}
else if (pid == 0) { // Child process
  execlp( "roslaunch", "roslaunch", "launchfolder", "launchfile.launch",NULL);
  // launchfolder is the directory where your launchfile is
  exit(1);
}
else { // parent process
  launchPID = pid;
}

// Kill the started process when exiting the application (in onExit() and/or onClose() callbacks:
if (launchPID) kill(launchPID, 15);

Using system() instead is much easier, but you don't have any control over the processes you created...

I have developed a simple GUI to control drone using QtCreater, PyQT, and ROS. You can find it on this link https://github.com/pavankumarbn/Drone... . Also In this video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNgfM... ), you can find detailed information on the same.