How to develop ROS camera driver?

answered 2018-02-20 09:46:59 -0500

8729 ●137 ●239 ●256 https://github.com/lucasw

updated 2018-02-20 09:47:34 -0500

The bare minimum is to get images from your camera and then publish them as sensor_msgs/Image.

OpenCV is good as a data intermediate format, if you can get images from your camera and display them with cv::imshow or save them to disk with imwrite and they look good then converting them to ros with cv_bridge should be painless.

The next thing to do is use image_transport CameraPublisher and use a CameraInfoManager along with it and you will be able to get compressed image outputs and synchronized camera_info messages along with the standard image.

For performance it is good to have the driver be a nodelet.

Dynamic reconfigure support is nice for changing parameters that should be adjustable live- exposure, frame rate, and anything else the camera supports.

Beyond that look at examples of existing cameras:

https://github.com/ros-drivers/usb_cam

https://github.com/magazino/pylon_camera

https://github.com/ros-drivers/pointg...

https://github.com/ros-drivers/axis_c...

(Is there a generic network or security camera driver?)

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Comments

@lucasw thank you for your information. For Point grey camera Blackfly S (Spinnaker SDK).

SumitP ( 2018-02-20 09:55:17 -0500 )edit

Is that not supported by the existing pointgrey drivers? If it is only a small set of changes on the existing drivers you should try to fork and make required changes then pull request the changes so that others can use it.