How to run two cameras in ROS at different times?

asked 2014-02-10 10:11:48 -0500

Ralff
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updated 2016-10-24 08:37:26 -0500

ngrennan
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I am trying to run two cameras on one single board computer with ROS and OpenCV, but I do not want to run the cameras at the same time. I want to run camera A until a specific moment then turn camera A off and turn camera B on; then B off and A on, and so on...

I am not sure how to do this effectively or at all really. I understand how to start up both cameras with a launch file or turn them off and on manually, but I want to do this automatically as certain parameters are met. Any ideas or advice?

Thanks - Ralff

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answered 2014-02-10 10:28:06 -0500

ahendrix

47576 ●179 ●367 ●662 http://namniart.com/

This is probably a good use case for the capabilities server: http://wiki.ros.org/capabilities ( tutorial )

The capabilities server allows you to declare launch files as capabilities, and then bring them up and down using ROS service calls.

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Thanks. I will read up on capabilities to see if that will work. By the way, one reason I do not want to run two cameras simultaneously is that I receive an error for exceeding the bus capacity. It also seems more efficient to only run the camera that is being used.

Ralff ( 2014-02-10 15:33:39 -0500 )edit

I was never able to get the capabilities server working, but I found a way to control two cameras by writing a program to kill and restart the nodes using fork. This wasn't the cleanest method for doing this, but it worked fine for my application.

Ralff ( 2014-09-03 14:02:25 -0500 )edit

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answered 2014-02-10 11:06:40 -0500

fergs

13902 ●59 ●157 ●196 http://www.robotandchisel.com

One option is to have whatever node is using the image topics (and presumably contains the logic about what image topic it wants at a given time) unsubscribe/subscribe on demand. In theory, unsubscribing and then resubscribing would be less expensive than starting/stopping the node. This does assume the camera node does a lazy publish (that is, it checks if there is a subscriber, and if not it won't bother grabbing a frame from the camera and publishing it), however, this is typically quite common.

Another option would be to use dynamic reconfigure to start/stop the publishing, but this would certainly require modifying the camera node as I'm not aware of any camera nodes that have such an interface.

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How to run two cameras in ROS at different times?

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