Plot multiple x/y arrays from a single message

[defunctzombie]

A common pattern in planning, perception, or controls is producing several candidate options (paths, trajectories, etc) at any time. These candidates may appear in a single message (as arrays of candidates). An engineer may want to visualize these different candidates against one another on a single plot.

The current plot panel allows a user to plot arbitrary x/y values from an array within a message using the current x-axis setting. This setting (like the accumulated) setting only allows the user to select 1 x-axis value and explicit multiple y-axis values.

We should provide a way to allow the user to select arrays of x/y values and plot each array of x/y values as a dataset.

[tonynajjar]

That would be extremely useful! I'm surprised there aren't more upvotes on this. I just wrote a similar issue https://github.com/orgs/foxglove/discussions/803 but this one formulates the feature request more generically

[mirsking]

+1

[kyoichi-sugahara]

@defunctzombie @tonynajjar
I feel this feature is really necessary, and if currently no one has provided a way to implement this functionality, I'm thinking of trying to address it even in a hacky way using TypeScript. Do you have any information about this?

[defunctzombie]

I cannot think of an easy way to hack around this. It is a feature that does not exist in the plot panel - the ability to select different x values for different series on a scatterplot.