rviz view_robot extreme slowdown
I am trying to understand the reason for an extreme slowdown in visualization of the turtlebot view.
I am very new to ROS. I have a recently assembled turtlebot that I can tele-operate. It took me some time to figure out how to launch its 3d camera (Orbbec Astra); I only managed to do it by installing astra_camera and astra_launch packages. I am now trying to visualize what the robot sees using rviz. After launching the camera on the robot (roslaunch astra_launch astra.launch) I launch rviz on the workstation: roslaunch turtlebot_rviz_launchers view_robot.launch.
The problem is that visualization works extremely slow. I only tried Image and DepthCloud. Visualization starts with just a few frames per second, quickly degrading to less than a frame per second, then freezing. Occasionally unfreezing to show a few frames, then freezing again. DepthCloud is probably even worse than Image.
It seems to me there is some problem in communication between the workstation and turtlebot. I observed what happens to ping readings when I use rviz. When there is no stream of data (Image and DepthCloud are unchecked in rviz), everything is fine, ping time is in order of milliseconds, and I have no problem tele-operating the robot. When I turn on the data stream (check Image or DepthCloud), ping time quickly climbs to hundreds or thousands of milliseconds, rviz shows something, then freezes for sometime, like I described above. At this point I either cannot control the bot via teleop, or there is a lag of up to many seconds. If I interrupt the data stream by unchecking corresponding boxes in rviz, everything comes back to normal and I can teleop again.
Can somebody help me understand this behavior and how it can be fixed? I have ubuntu 14.04, ROS-indigo. The turtlebot is new, and the workstation is not very old.
