Installing the Web-based visualization tools

The installation of a Web-based visualization is slightly more complex than for other packages since changes outside of the ROS environment are required.

Inside the ROS ecosystem, resources like binary files can be described using different kinds of URLs like file:/ /, http:/ / or package:/ /, which specifies the path relative to a ROS package. These URLs can be resolved using the resource_retriever tool. Since the webserver does not access to the whole file system, this mechanism does not work any more if requests are made from a website. The ros3djs library therefore rewrites package:/ / URLs to point to the docroot of the website. For example, meshes in the package pr2_description are now searched for at http://localhost/pr2_description.