Robotics is a complex research area with many problems that are yet unsolved. Often, the key to understanding difficult problems is appropriate visualization of the underlying data.

The application Visdo is designed to display arbitrary process data. It implements a publicly available network protocol that allows other applications to send their process data to it for displaying. Visdo acts as a client that receives applications’ process data via TCP/IP network.

Fig. 1: Visualization of terrain classification data for a patrolling autonomous vehicle

While Visdo has been designed as a generic displayer of arbitrary data, it includes some optimizations for robotic applications, such as displaying of map data.

Fig. 2: Visualization of a terrain height map

The application can display 2-D as well as 3-D data. When in 3-D mode, it uses OpenGL for hardware-accelerated fast plotting.

Fig. 3: Visualization of a 3-D laser scan sweep

Visdo is a Java application and is able to run on all Java 5-compliant virtual machines.