No camera topics

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Hello, I am new to ROS and Ubuntu and recently I was also struggling to make the camera work for turtlebot3 waffle_pi. For me, I followed this route and now the camera is working fine in SLAM, the topics are available and rqt_image_view also shows the live feed from the camera.

I am using Ubuntu 20.04 with ROS-noetic with a Turtlebot3 waffle_pi robot hosting a Raspberry Pi 4 2GB SBC.

The issue here is that the raspicam_node for noetic is difficult to set up as most methods require deleting the previous catkin_ws and building a new one. However, I followed the last method in this link text. I will sum it up for you:

First of all, make sure the camera is working using the raspistill command and the peripherals for the camera are enabled in raspi-config.

Test it as:

raspistill -v -o test.jpg

Clone the package from github in your catkin_ws/src folder:

 cd catkin_ws/src

git clone https://github.com/UbiquityRobotics/raspicam_node

Install the libraries:

sudo apt install libraspberrypi-dev libraspberrypi0 libpigpiod-if-dev

Install some packages:

sudo apt install ros-noetic-compressed-image-transport ros-noetic-camera-info-manager ros-noetic-diagnostic-updater

Afterward, compile the catkin_ws and source:

cd ..

catkin_make

source devel/setup.bash

The next thing is running two launch files at the same time to visualize the camera input in SLAM.

First, run a roscore on the remote-PC:

roscore

Open a secure shell with a robot and launch raspicam_node:

roslaunch raspicam_node camerav2_1280x960.launch

Open another secure shell and bring up the robot:

roslaunch turtlebot3_bringup turtlebot3_robot.launch

Now in the remote PC:

roslaunch turtlebot3_slam turtlebot3_slam.launch

In the new terminal window:

rqt_image_view

The image from the camera would be visible in both Rviz (where SLAM is running) and the rqt_image_view window. Also, if you do 'rostopic list' in remote-PC, you would be able to see the camera-related topic published by raspicam_node.

This method worked for me. I apologize for any typos or inconvenience.

Thank you,

Muhammad Umar Farooq