Streaming point clouds to webservice with roslibjs
I know that I want the rostopic /camera/depth/points. If I rostopic echo /camera/depth/points then I can see that data in bash. I can also get the roslibjs example working just fine. I'm working across multiple machines so unfortunately ros3djs was not an option for me (*you can only render pointclouds on the localhost due to webgl limitations - more details at bottom of this question).
Good news is that I only want the data so I'm hoping to benifit from some of the ros3djs encoding. Anyway, I tried using roslibjs with object type std_msgs/PointCloud2 to no avail:
[ERROR] [WallTime: 1477400298.863397] [Client 0] [id: subscribe:/camera/depth/points:1] subscribe: Unable to import msg class PointCloud2 from package std_msgs. Caused by 'module' object has no attribute 'PointCloud2'
How can I get my pointcloud data from my ros instance on one machine to a non-ros machine using this webservice?
CODE
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://cdn.robotwebtools.org/EventEmitter2/current/eventemitter2.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://cdn.robotwebtools.org/roslibjs/current/roslib.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" type="text/javascript">
// Connecting to ROS
// -----------------
var ros = new ROSLIB.Ros({
url : 'ws://192.168.1.100:9090'
});
ros.on('connection', function() {
console.log('Connected to websocket server.');
});
ros.on('error', function(error) {
console.log('Error connecting to websocket server: ', error);
});
ros.on('close', function() {
console.log('Connection to websocket server closed.');
});
// Subscribing to a Topic
// ----------------------
var listener = new ROSLIB.Topic({
ros : ros,
name : '/camera/depth/points',
messageType : 'std_msgs/PointCloud2'
});
listener.subscribe(function(message) {
console.log('Received message on ' + listener.name + ': ' + message.data);
listener.unsubscribe();
});
</script>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Simple roslib Example</h1>
<p>Check your Web Console for output.</p>
</body>
</html>
*(from the ros3djs example) Due to a bug in the current WebGL implementations, it is not possible to serve this file and the video stream from a different host or port number, so we need ros_web_video to serve the html file as well. If you use Apache, you can set it up to proxy port 9999 to a subdirectory.
-- UPDATE --
My issue is definitely because I'm not running tf2_web_republisher but I'm having a hard time getting it installed. I tried cloning the source to ~/catkin_ws/src, catkin_make, source ~/.bashrc with no success.
How do I get the tf2_web_republisher tool installed? I've already sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-tf2*
