uvc_ros_driver is a ROS package that publishes video streams from USB video devices. It is made for devices that send multiple grayscale images as well as IMU data encoded in a color image stream.

Prerequisites

You will need ROS indigo and the ait_ros_messages ROS package.

You need libusb installed:

sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev

You also need libuvc, which can be installed with the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/ktossell/libuvc
cd libuvc
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make && sudo make install

Installation

Clone this repository in your catkin workspace.

MAVLink Submodule

This package depends on MAVLink. To initialize and check out the submodule, run this:

git submodule init
git submodule update --recursive

Building

Build using catkin_make according to the ROS instructions on http://ros.org.

Set up Permissions

Ubuntu comes with a serial modem manager which interferes heavily with any robotics related use of a serial port (or USB serial). It can deinstalled without side effects:

sudo apt-get remove modemmanager

To get proper permissions for the USB device, run the following script with the device attached:

sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER
sudo ./fix_permissions.sh

Check the device vendor and product id from the list and enter them when prompted. The printed list has the format ... {idDevice:idProduct} ....

Log out of Ubuntu and Log back in. Unplug the device and plug it back in to load it with the new permissions.

Running the driver

roslaunch uvc_ros_driver uvc_ros_driver.launch

To flip the images horizontally, appropriately change the ros parameter defined in the launch file.

The stereo images and IMU messages will be published on the topic /vio_sensor as a VioSensorMsg defined in the ait_ros_messages package.

If you need the images and IMU messages seperately, you can run

rosrun ait_ros_messages vio_sensor_republisher.py

This will publish the images and IMUs on the topics /left_image, /right_image, /imu, respectively.