Robotics StackExchange | Archived questions

Image publishing over WiFi screeching to < 1FPS when workstation echoes topic

Hi,

I have the following setup:


First off, I have managed to run the non-ROS MobileNet example for the OAK-D (link) and see the image stream on my main workstation at a decent FPS, all over SSH.

On the ROS 2 side, when running the example OAK-D launch files on the Pi over SSH things seem normal at first: I am able to list the topics and when checking, for instance, the RGB topic (/color/image)'s frequency (still from within the Pi) I see close to 40 Hz.

Things start to fall apart once I try and interact with this topic from my main workstation. If I run ros2 topic hz /color/image on my laptop the publishing rate screeches to either a total halt or a very slow (<1 FPS) rate, and eventually the SSH connection fails.

The same goes for when I try to echo /color/image, or view the image stream in rviz2. As soon as I CTRL+C out of the echo I see the FPS jump back to normal on Pi.

What I have tried: Though I am a novice at this, I tried to tune my cross-vendor settings using this guide. I didn't notice any changes after increasing ipfrag_high_thresh or decreasing ipfrag_time.

I would appreciate some help understanding what may be causing this, if this is expected behavior, etc. Thanks in advance.

Asked by coatwolf on 2023-04-02 22:42:02 UTC

Comments

The problem probably occur because you are using uncompressed images, try to stream compressed images using the image_transport plugin (some sensors publish also compress images out of the box).

Then you can rostopic echo the compressed version of the topic /color/image/compressed, on Rviz instead you can select the compressed version of the topic from the topic panel

Asked by AlessioParmeggiani on 2023-04-03 09:35:53 UTC

Answers