ROS with optitrack setup

Hi all, I am using ROS Kinetic on an Ubuntu 16.04 machine and want to obtain data from optitrack motive. I have seen the following posts:
https://answers.ros.org/question/54255/communication-between-ros-and-optitrack/
https://answers.ros.org/question/227375/how-can-i-connect-optitrack-and-ros-together/

and they helped me understand that I need to use either mocapoptitrack or rosvrpn_client, but I couldn't understand the most basic question:
What should y computer setup be? Should I be running Ubuntu as a VM inside the windows PC with optitrack motive? or the other way around? or create a local LAN between two separate machines?

In all cases I also have the following misunderstanding: If the Ubuntu machine (or VM) is connected to the drone (I use an ar-drone2) via the drones wifi adapter how can it also be connected to the Windows machine and its network? When starting with ROS I remember everyone saying not to have the ROS machine connected to more than one network at the same time, so how is this supposed to work?

As you can tell I just started looking into this and have no clue what I got myself into. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Asked by oha on 2018-03-13 01:42:58 UTC

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Answers

Ok, so I ended up with the following setup that I think will work (for now I am getting data properly, and should be able to send it to the drone).

I have an Ubuntu 16.04 machine with ROS Kinetic installed.
I have a separate Windows 7 machine with Motive installed.
Both machines are connected to a netgear nighthawk that is bridging the wifi provided by the AR.Drone 2 that I am using.
My workflow is using PuTTY to remote control my Ubuntu machine while in windows.
I used vrpn_client_ros (not to be confused with the outdated ros_vrpn_client) and the instructions on how that worked can be found in my answer to my other question located here:
https://answers.ros.org/question/285887/ros_vrpn_client-installation-help/?answer=286483#post-id-286483

Asked by oha on 2018-03-25 11:15:52 UTC