[ros-users] Best way to view RViz remotely?

[Patrick Goebel]

Hello,

I am running ROS (latest cturtle) on my robot using an onboard 1.6 Ghz 
dual-core Zotac ION-ITX with 4Gb RAM.  This setup is fairly snappy when 
I view RViz through a monitor directly attached to the robot 
motherboard.  However, I'd like to run the Zotac/robot headless and view 
RViz on my desktop.  The robot connects to my local LAN via 802.11g and 
my desktop is hardwired at 100 Mb/s. These are the only two machines on 
the network and I am running the basic navigation stack with a Hokuyo 
laser scanner.

The best result I've gotten so far is using a VNC connection from my 
desktop to the robot.  However, updates in RViz are quite sluggish (2-3 
seconds delay).  The second best is to use "ssh -X" from the desktop to 
the robot and display RViz back to the desktop.  This is really, really 
sluggish (3-5 seconds delay).

Is there a better way to view the robot data in RViz?

Thanks!
Patrick Goebel
Behavioral Sciences
Stanford University