console_bridge is a ROS-independent package that provides logging calls that
mirror those found in rosconsole, but for applications that are not necessarily
using ROS.

Normally in ROS C++ code, developers can log data via rosconsole using the
macros ROS_DEBUG, ROS_INFO, ROS_WARN, and ROS_ERROR. These logging messages are
not only outputted to the screen (depending on log level of course), but are
also published to /rosout so that other ROS nodes can subscribe to
them. Applications like rqt and its predecessor rxconsole provide graphical
interfaces for seeing logs during application runtime.

The problem with this approach is that libraries that are meant to run without
ROS infrastructure and/or may not want or need the log publishing cannot use
the traditional rosconsole. This is where console_bridge comes in.

Homepage:
http://wiki.ros.org/console_bridge
