You probably want to take a look at roslaunch/Tutorials/Roslaunch Nodes in Valgrind or GDB. Make sure to build proper Debug binaries.
Btw: this is not really specific to catkin_make. The launch-prefix just makes this convenient when starting things from launch files. For single nodes (and an already running master), you can also just do:
gdb --args /path/to/your/node/binary
[..] I haven't found anything regarding this on the internet so far.
The tutorial I linked was actually the first result after searching for ros gdb on Google.
Edit:
I have tried starting gdb directly with the executable but it says no debugging symbols found.
I have also tried to do set(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS "${CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS} -g -O0 -std=c++11 -march=native" ) without success.
This has been answered before, see fi Cmake debug option:
This will set -g for you:
catkin_make -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
catkin is just a thin layer on top of CMake in this case.
And if you need optimisation with debug symbols, see catkin_make's option for optimization:
For a release configuration with opmizations and no debugging symbols, you can use the Release build type:
catkin_make -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
For a release with debug configuration, with optimizations and debug symbols, you can use the RelWithDebInfo build type:
catkin_make -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
CMake's useful variables page gives more information about build types.
