Inferred Interactive Controls Through Provenance Tracking of ROS Message Data

Interactive controls that enrich visualizations need domain knowledge to create a sensible visual representation, as well as access to parameters and data to manipulate. However, source data and the means to visualize them are often scattered across multiple components, making it hard to link a value change in the interface to the appropriate source data. Provenance, the documentation of the origin and history of message data, can be used to reverse the evaluation of a value and change it at its source. We present a communication pattern as well as a C++ support library for ROS to track the provenance of message data across multiple nodes and apply source changes, reversing any transformation on the tracked data. We demonstrate that it is possible to automatically infer interactive 3D user interfaces from standard, non-interactive ROS visualizations by leveraging this additional tracking information. Preliminary results from a prototypical implementation of multiple origin tracking enabled ROS nodes indicate, that this tracking introduces a significant but still practicable message size and serialization performance overhead. To apply this tracking to existing C++ codebases only small, syntactic changes are necessary: a wrapper type around tracked values hides all necessary bookkeeping.