Robotics 2
Gnuplot
Giorgio Grisetti, Cyrill Stachniss,
Kai Arras, Wolfram Burgard
Motivation
Introduction to the most relevant tools commonly
used in scientific writing
LaTeX - a general typesetting system
Gnuplot - a plotting utility to visualize data
Why not Using Excel?
“I am happy with Excel, why not use it?”
Excel plots are ugly
No automatic processing of data files, …
Excel is clearly suboptimal for scientific working
(reformatting takes ages, no scripting, limited
functionality …)
By default, Excel outputs raster images
Gnuplot
Powerful 2D and 3D plotting utility
Plotting is possible with very few lines of code
Batch processing (plotting multiple plots in one
run)
Various output formats (eps, pdf, png, X11, latex,
xfig, …)
Data can be plotting via stdin/stdout
Free and available for basically all platforms
One of the mayor plotting standards
(besides Matlab)
An Gnuplot Example
plot “data3.dat” using 1:2
data3.dat
1 1 0.5 1.5
2 1 0.4 1.4
3 0 0 0
4 1 0 2
5 3 1 4
6 4 2 6
An Gnuplot Example
plot “data3.dat” using 1:2 notitle
An Gnuplot Example
plot “data3.dat” using 1:2 notitle w points ps 5
Running Gnuplot
Run: gnuplot mygnuplotfile.gnuplot
It either produces and image or show the result
on the screen (terminal X11)
Gnuplot can also read commands from stdin
This is excellent for debugging code
Gnuplot Example
reset
set terminal X11
set title "One- and Two-tau models"
set xrange [0:15]
set yrange [0:1.5]
set xlabel "Time [nS]"
set ylabel "Voltage, normalized“
plot 1-exp(-x/3.8825) title "Single time constant",\
1-(3.44*exp(-x/3.44)-0.44*exp(-x/0.44))/3.0 title "Two time
constants"
Hands on Gnuplot Examples
see examples on the web
gnuplot points.gnuplot
gnuplot lines1.gnuplot
gnuplot lines2.gnuplot
gnuplot filledcurve.gnuplot
gnuplot function.gnuplot
gnuplot errorbars.gnuplot
gnuplot histogram.gnuplot
gnuplot boxes.gnuplot
gnuplot box-error.gnuplot
gnuplot surface.gnuplot
gnuplot world.gnuplot
gnuplot labeling.gnuplot
perl example.pl | gnuplot
...
Gnuplot Summary
Gnuplot is much more powerful than what is
shown here
Ones needs to get used to the syntax but it pays
off immediately
There are a lot of tutorials available online
See gnuplot demo page:
http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/demo/
As well as the “Impossible Gnuplot Plots”:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~zov1/gnuplot/gnuplot.html
Get used to Gnuplot NOW!