Revision history [back]

Current answer is to use http://wiki.ros.org/usb_cam.

There appear to be two flavors of usb camera support usb_cam uses the v4l interface but doesn't provide the uvc controls, while libuvc_camera attempts to provide those controls but only supports uvc cameras. It also doesn't seem quite as stable as usb_cam, and requires taking down the usb kernel modules- you have to restore them yourself if you want to use your usb camera normally outside of ros after using libuvc_camera.

A good interim solution may be to make a standalone uvc control node that doesn't require interfering with v4l, and doesn't attempt to provide an image, just camera controls just like v4l2ucp. It would be great to have all those controls in dynamic reconfigure but dr requires all the controls be known at build time to generate the controls for them (or is that only true when using the config file, can controls be generated programmatically?), while the uvc interface I think can enumerate any kind of control on connection to a different kind of camera. It would be possible to generate a bunch of rostopics live that can be arbitrarilly named.

Current answer is to use http://wiki.ros.org/usb_cam.

There appear to be two flavors of usb camera support usb_cam uses the v4l interface but doesn't provide the uvc controls, while libuvc_camera attempts to provide those controls but only supports uvc cameras. It also doesn't seem quite as stable as usb_cam, and requires taking down the usb kernel modules- you have to restore them yourself if you want to use your usb camera normally outside of ros after using libuvc_camera.

A good interim solution may be to make a standalone uvc control node that doesn't require interfering with v4l, and doesn't attempt to provide an image, just camera controls just like v4l2ucp. It would be great to have all those controls in dynamic reconfigure but dr requires all the controls be known at build time to generate the controls for them (or is that only true when using the config file, can controls be generated programmatically?), while the uvc interface I think can enumerate any kind of control on connection to a different kind of camera. It would be possible to generate a bunch of rostopics live that can be arbitrarilly named.