Using the "Player" package

asked 2011-06-22 12:54:12 -0500

xeronia
48 ●2 ●2 ●6

updated 2011-06-22 22:13:26 -0500

Martin Günther

11816 ●82 ●159 ●198 https://www.dfki.de/en...

Hi,

I am trying to use the "Player" package with a package that I am working on, but I can't seem to find any documentation telling me how to use that package.

Right now, I have "player" listed as a dependency in my manifest.xml file of the package I'm writing, and that's it. Running "cmake ." in the directory doesn't give any errors. Running "make" tells me that it's not finding any Player packages.

Is there something I'm missing in CMakeLists.txt?

Thanks!

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answered 2011-06-24 04:45:44 -0500

xeronia
48 ●2 ●2 ●6

I got Player and ROS to integrate without the Player package, with ROS Diamondback and Player 3.0.2.

Instructions are here: http://brice-rebsamen.blogspot.com/2011/05/first-exercise-with-ros-node-to.html

The key is to edit the CMakeLists.txt file so that ROS finds all of the Player libraries that are installed during compilation.

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answered 2011-06-22 22:06:03 -0500

Martin Günther

11816 ●82 ●159 ●198 https://www.dfki.de/en...

updated 2013-11-13 01:01:23 -0500

If you want to get a camera running with ros, wrapping player is usually not the way to go. Instead, you should try to find a ROS driver that supports the camera.

We also have a Logitech Quickcam Orbit/Sphere (vendor/product ID 046d:08b5), and got it running by modifying the uvc_camera package. We didn't release it yet because the clean way to go would be to integrate our hack into the uvc_camera package instead of releasing yet another fork.

I've uploaded a snapshot here:

git clone <a href="http://www.informatik.uni-osnabrueck.de/mguenthe/git/uos-camera_umd.git">http://www.informatik.uni-osnabrueck.de/mguenthe/git/uos-camera_umd.git</a>

Update: I've uploaded the current version of the package here: https://github.com/mintar/uos-camera_umd . It runs on Fuerte, Groovy, Hydro. Still a very bad hack. :-)

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Comments

Hi Martin, It was nice to meet you at IROS, do you have Orbit driver that can control pan/tilt motor as well?

Kei Okada ( 2013-11-08 17:43:43 -0500 )edit

Hi Kei, nice to meet you too! :-)

Martin Günther ( 2013-11-11 22:55:18 -0500 )edit

We've experimented with the Orbit's pan/tilt motor back on player, but got very poor repeatability and so abandoned the idea. I can't find any code related to that any more; but there's a tool called `setpwc` in Debian that allows you to control the motor from the command line.

Martin Günther ( 2013-11-11 22:55:41 -0500 )edit

The URL is here: http://www.vanheusden.com/setpwc/ The source code is very short, so it should be easy to wrap that into a ROS driver.

Martin Günther ( 2013-11-11 22:57:10 -0500 )edit

2

unfortunately, setpwc does not work, but guvcview after uvcdynctrl --import=/usr/share/uvcdynctrl/data/046d/logitech.xml works, thanks! http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=77379

Satoshi Iwashi ( 2013-11-12 23:14:09 -0500 )edit

1

Awesome! Since there still seem to be people using this, I've uploaded our hackish driver to Github (see above).

Martin Günther ( 2013-11-13 01:02:10 -0500 )edit

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answered 2011-07-03 05:45:32 -0500

Lorenzo Riano
1342 ●26 ●34 ●50 http://www.eecs.berkel...

At the University of Ulster we wrote wrappers for several player proxies. You can find them in our stack: Player Interface. The code does not have a proper documentation, but it should be straightforward to use. Please contact me if you need any information on how to use the code.