FLIR/Spinnaker ROS2 driver

Simple ROS2 driver for the FLIR cameras using the Spinnaker SDK.

NOTE: This driver is not written or supported by FLIR.

Tested cameras:

The following cameras have been tested:

• Blackfly S (USB3, GigE)
• Grashopper (USB3)
• Chameleon (USB3) tested on firmware v1.13.3.00

Note: if you get other cameras to work, please report back, ideally submit a pull request with the camera config file you have created.

Supported platforms

Software:

• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
• ROS2 Galactic and Foxy
• Spinnaker 2.6.0.157 (other versions may work as well but this is what the continuous integration builds are using)

The code compiles under Ubuntu 22.04 / Humble but has not been tested yet with real hardware.

Features

Basic features are supported like setting exposure, gain, and external triggering. It's straight forward to support new camera types and features by editing the camera definition (.cfg) files. Unless you need new pixel formats you may not have to modify any source code. The code is meant to be a thin wrapper for setting the features available in FLIR's SpinView program.

How to build

1. Install the FLIR spinnaker driver.
2. Prepare the ROS2 driver build: Make sure you have your ROS2 environment sourced:

source /opt/ros/galactic/setup.bash

Create a workspace (flir_spinnaker_ros2_ws), clone this repo, and use wstool to pull in the remaining dependencies:

mkdir -p ~/flir_spinnaker_ros2_ws/src
cd ~/flir_spinnaker_ros2_ws
git clone https://github.com/berndpfrommer/flir_spinnaker_ros2 src/flir_spinnaker_ros2
wstool init src src/flir_spinnaker_ros2/flir_spinnaker_ros2.rosinstall

# or to update an existing space
# wstool merge -t src src/flir_spinnaker_ros2/flir_spinnaker_ros2.rosinstall
# wstool update -t src

To automatically install all packages that the flir_spinnaker_ros2 depends upon, run this at the top of your workspace:

rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src

3. Build the driver and source the workspace:

colcon build --symlink-install --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON
. install/setup.bash

Example usage

How to launch the example file:

ros2 launch flir_spinnaker_ros2 blackfly_s.launch.py camera_name:=blackfly_0 serial:="'20435008'"

Setting up GigE cameras

The Spinnaker SDK abstracts away the transport layer so a GigE camera should work the same way as USB3: you point it to the serial number and you're set.

There are a few GigE-specific settings in the Transport Layer Control group that are important, in particular enabling jumbo frames from the camera per FLIR's recommendations. The following line in your camera-specific config file will create a ROS2 parameter gev_scps_packet_size:

gev_scps_packet_size int "TransportLayerControl/GigEVision/GevSCPSPacketSize"

that you can then set in your ROS2 launch file:

 "gev_scps_packet_size": 9000

As far as setting up the camera's IP address: you can set up DHCP on your network or configure a static persistent IP using SpinView in "Transport Layer Control">"GigE Vision". Check the box for "Current IP Configuration Persistent IP" first to enable it, then set your desired addresses under "Persistent IP Address", "Persistent Subnet Mask" and "Persistent Gateway". NOTE: these look like regular IPs, but to set them you have to enter the 32-bit integer representation of the IP address/mask. By hand/calculator: convert the IP octets from decimal to hex, then combine them and convert to a 32-bit integer, ex: 192.168.0.1 -> 0xC0A80001 -> 3232235521.

The "Transport Layer Control">"GigE Vision" section of SpinView is also where you'll find that "SCPS Packet Size" setting, which you can change when not capturing frames, and verify it works in SpinView and without needing to spin up a custom launch file to get started, though it helps, and you'll probably want one anyway to specify your camera's serial number.

For more tips on GigE setup look at FLIR's support pages here and here.

Camera synchronization

In the launch folder you can find a working example for launching drivers for two hardware synchronized Blackfly S cameras. The launch file requires two more packages to be installed, cam_sync_ros2(for time stamp syncing) and exposure_control_ros2 (for external exposure control). See below for more details on those packages.

Time stamps

When running hardware synchronized cameras in a stereo configuration two drivers will need to be run, one for each camera. This will mean however that their published ROS header time stamps are not identical which in turn may prevent down-stream ROS nodes from recognizing the images as being hardware synchronized. You can use the cam_sync_ros2 node to force the time stamps to be aligned.

Automatic exposure

While FLIR cameras generally have built-in exposure control, in a synchronized setting it is sometimes desirable to also synchronize and completely control the auto-exposure. For instance in a stereo setup matching left and right image patches can be difficult when each camera runs its own auto exposure. The exposure_control_ros2 package can provide external automatic exposure control. To this end the driver publishes meta data messages and subscribes to camera control messages.

How to add new features

For lack of a more systematic way to discover the camera configuration node names the following procedure is recommended for adding new features:

• fire up FLIR's spinview application and find the parameter you want to add to the config.

• start with an existing config file in the config directory, make a copy and give the feature a name that follows the established convention of other parameters (all lower case, separate by underscores), for example

    device_link_throughput_limit int "DeviceControl/DeviceLinkThroughputLimit"
  

  The parameter name is followed by the parameter type (in this example int), which you have to somewhat guess. If spinview shows a multiple choice drop-down box, the parameter is of type enum, a check box translates to bool, otherwise it's float or int (check what input spinview) accepts.

• the hard part is the node name which is the last parameter of the line, in this example "DeviceControl/DeviceLinkThroughputLimit". It usually follows by removing spaces from the spinview names. If that doesn't work, launch the driver with the dump_node_map parameter set to "True" and look at the output for inspiration.

Once you have modified the config file, now just set the newly created parameter in the launch file, done.

Known issues

1. If you run multiple drivers in separate nodes that all access USB based devices, starting a new driver will stop the image acquisition of currently running drivers. There is an ugly workaround for this currently implemented: if image delivery stops for more than acquisition_timeout seconds, the acquisition is restarted. This operation may not be thread safe so the driver already running could possibly crash. This issue can be avoided by running all drivers in the same address space with a composable node.

How to contribute

Please provide feedback if you cannot get your camera working or if the code does not compile for you. Feedback is crucial for the software development process.

Bug fixes and config files for new cameras are greatly appreciated. Before submitting a pull request, run this to see if your commit passes some basic lint tests:

colcon test --packages-select flir_spinnaker_ros2 && colcon test-result --verbose

License

This software is issued under the Apache License Version 2.0.