Giskard publishes visualization markers, when objects are added to the world, to visualize the planning or to show collisions. To see these you need to add a MarkerArray plugin and set the topic to /giskard/visualization_marker_array. There are namespaces for all things named above.

You might also want to add an InteractiveMarkers plugin and set the topic to /eef_control/update. Most launch files also launch the interactive_marker.py node in addition to giskard. If not, it can be added like this.

  <node pkg="giskardpy" type="interactive_marker.py" name="giskard_interactive_marker" output="screen">
    <rosparam param="enable_self_collision">False</rosparam>
    <rosparam param="interactive_marker_chains">
      - [odom_combined, r_gripper_tool_frame]
      - [odom_combined, l_gripper_tool_frame]
      - [odom_combined, base_footprint]
    </rosparam>
  </node>

This creates an interactive marker at the tips of all the kinematic chains specified in the launch file. In this example for the Pr2 one for each hand and one for the base. Moving the markers will send cartesian goals to Giskard.

There is also a node that sends joint goals to Giskard.

rosrun giskardpy joint_goal_publisher.py