RViz Panel: How not to freeze RViz?

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Hey there,

I have written a C++ RViz custom panel. The implementation roughly follows this example link.

The panel subscribe to a specific topic PointStamped type, and fills a list that gets displayed inside the panel as x and y coordinates.

Now, I've created a push button and implemented an actionlib move_base goal function. The purpose is, the robot to go from one point to another. The problem is while i succesfully send the goals, RViz Visualization is blocked/freezed until the move is complete probably because ac.waitForResult() is a blocking function.

How can i overcome this and let RViz keep visualizing robot's position while the robot moves to a point, get the result and then move to another point in the list. What i was thinking is probably about blocking GUI thread, so i good idead proably is to spin a new thread, but how can i accomplish this? Correct me. if I am wrong, and please if you need more info just let me know.

Here is a block of code that i am using right now and is blocking:

void Waypoints::moveTo() {
//tell the action client that we want to spin a thread by default
MoveBaseClient ac("move_base",true);
//wait for the action server to come up
while(!ac.waitForServer(ros::Duration(5.0))){
    ROS_INFO("Waiting for the move_base action server to come up");
}
ROS_INFO("Move_base action server has come up");

move_base_msgs::MoveBaseGoal goal;

for (size_t x = 0; x < mBestPathNodes.size() - 1; x++) {
   // we'll send a goal to the robot to move 1 meter forward
    goal.target_pose.header.frame_id = "map";
    goal.target_pose.header.stamp = ros::Time::now();

    goal.target_pose.pose.position.x = mWaypoints[mBestPathNodes[x]].point.x;
    goal.target_pose.pose.position.y = mWaypoints[mBestPathNodes[x]].point.y;
    goal.target_pose.pose.orientation.w = 1.0;

    ROS_INFO("Sending goal");

    ac.sendGoal(goal);
    ac.waitForResult();
    bool finished_before_timeout = ac.waitForResult(ros::Duration(30.0));

      if (finished_before_timeout)
      {
        actionlib::SimpleClientGoalState state = ac.getState();
        ROS_INFO("Action finished: %s",state.toString().c_str());
      }
      else
        ROS_INFO("Action did not finish before the time out.");

}