Hello everyone,

I am planning to do a project with point clouds however I don't have a lot of prior knowledge in ROS and even less with tools like rviz or gazebo. However I saw that in rviz it seems easy to display all kinds of live data from ROS like for instance point cloud data.

Now I was wondering what the capabilities of rviz are. For my project it would be cool if an user could load objects/meshes into the world (I would use an .obj or other common file type for this) and move them in the 3d world. I also saw there are different marker types natively. I don't know if I could also use those as some primitive objects for first tests.

For placing the objects it would be interesting to calculate if the the objects overlap with a live point cloud and if so, how many or which points do so. This should be the base for building a small application that allows the user to place the object and give some data over the chosen orientation/position to the robot which then can make use of that information.

Are there functionalities similar to this one in rviz already? On the other hand could it be a possibility to write some kind of plugin for this? Also it would be nice to at some point have some common UI elements etc so I was wondering how easy it is to build an applciation in/around rviz?

Sorry if this is a very open question but at the current moment I don't know better and I thought getting some insight would be useful. Please tell me if you need some more details to talk about this question.

I would be using ros noetic if this is important.

Thanks in advance!