flea3 (not maintained anymore, use https://github.com/ros-drivers/flir_camera_driver instead)

Another ROS driver for Point Grey USB3 camera.

Note:

The driver works with the following cameras:

Flea3

Grasshopper3

Chameleon3

Dependency: camera_base

See the dynamic reconfigure file for all reconfigurable parameters.

Supported hardware

These are the point-grey usb3 cameras that I have and tested with.

CM3-U3-13Y3M-CS

GS3-U3-23S6C-C

FL3-U3-13E4C-C

API Stability

The ROS API of this driver should be considered unstable.

ROS API

single_node is a node for a single flea3 camera.

Published topics

~image_raw (sensor_msgs/Image)

The unprocessed image data.

~camera_info (sensor_msgs/CameraInfo)

Contains the camera calibration (if calibrated).

Parameters

See the dynamic reconfigure file for all reconfigurable parameters.

Usage:

• single camera

roslaunch flea3 single_node.launch device:=13344889

• stereo camera

roslaunch flea3 stereo_node.launch left:=13344889 right:=14472242

Note that the stereo_node uses software trigger to synchronize two cameras and the delay is not compensated.

• Check available cameras

rosrun flea3 flea3_list_cameras

FlyCapture2

FlyCapture2 can be downloaded from here

Documentation

Flea3 Technical Manual

Grasshopper3 Technical Manual

Chameleon3 Technical Manual

Register Reference

Known Issues

Flycapture 2.8.3 issue

Flycapture 2.8.3 generally works, so you can upgrade to it if you are using only 1 camera. The ros driver using Flycapture 2.8.3 does not work well with more than 1 cameras as explained below.

The issue is that when launching the second camera, the Camera.StartCapture() method creates a new thread and never exits, thus blocking the following acquisition. PtGrey is working on a new release to fix this issue.

Flycapture 2.7.3 also generally works, but it has issues with USB3 on Intel chips under Ubuntu system. You can get around with just using USB2 cable, but if you require high fps + high resolution, then you should use Flycapture 2.6.4.

What a mess.

Optimizing USB performance under Linux

Here is an article from matrix-vision on how to optimize USB performance.

Another article from point-grey on how to optimize USB performance.

In /etc/default/grub, change

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash usbcore.usbfs_memory_mb=1024"

then do

sudo update-grub

then restart and verify that

cat /sys/module/usbcore/parameters/usbfs_memory_mb

is 1024

Also it is recommended to upgrade your kernel to 3.16 by doing

sudo apt-get install linux-signed-generic-lts-utopic