Overview
In Boxturtle, Cturtle, Diamondback and Electric, this stack contained several camera driver packages.
New in Fuerte: each camera driver formerly included here now resides in its own separate stack. For backwards compatibility, those stacks are listed as camera_drivers dependencies, but external dependencies should refer directly to the desired driver stack.
New in Hydro: the camera_drivers metapackage is no longer supported. Update dependencies to refer to specific drivers, instead.
Now, this page serves as a documentation node for common camera driver information.
Supported Hardware
The following camera drivers were formerly included in this stack. Each has its own separate stack now:
AVT/Prosilica Ethernet Cameras: in the prosilica_camera package; provides the streaming API or the polled API depending on the mode it is in.
Firewire (IEEE 1394) Digital Cameras: supported in the camera1394 package; provides the streaming camera API. Stereo Firewire cameras are also supported in camera1394stereo.
WGE100 Ethernet Cameras: supported in the wge100_camera package; provides the streaming camera API.
Other camera drivers:
Kinect: The openni_kinect stack works with the Microsoft Kinect and other OpenNI-compatible devices.
An overview of some third-party ROS drivers that work with USB cameras: http://www.iheartrobotics.com/2010/05/testing-ros-usb-camera-drivers.html
gscam (Gstreamer Cam): A generic driver that will work with any camera supported by gstreamer, in particular many webcams, can be found in the http://code.google.com/p/brown-ros-pkg/source/browse/#svn/trunk/unstable/gscam. The name of the driver used to be probe.
Swissranger SR3K and SR4K: supported in the swissranger_camera package.
Bumblebee: supported in the bumblebee2 package from cu-ros-pkg and also the camera1394stereo package.
Videre Stereo cameras (both STOC and regular): supported in the videre_stereo_cam package from ua-ros-pkg.
ROS API
To encourage compatibility between camera nodes, it is recommended that cameras provide one or both of the the following minimal APIs. The image_transport package provides a CameraPublisher class to help implementing this API. The camera_info_manager package exports a CameraInfoManager C++ class that provides sensor_msgs/CameraInfo data and handles sensor_msgs/SetCameraInfo service requests.
Streaming Camera Nodes
This API is for cameras that produce a continuous stream of images.Published Topics
camera/image_raw (sensor_msgs/Image)- Stream of images
- Camera intrinsics for images published on camera/image_raw
Services
camera/set_camera_info (sensor_msgs/SetCameraInfo)- Sets the camera's intrinsics
Polled Camera Nodes
This API is for cameras that produce an image only when polled. There may be multiple clients, each with their own response_namespace. These topics are only published in response to the request_image service. The polled_camera package provides support for implementing this API.Published Topics
<response_namespace>/image_raw (sensor_msgs/Image)- The polled image topic for a particular client.
- The corresponding camera state.
Services
set_camera_info (sensor_msgs/SetCameraInfo)- Sets the calibration parameters stored internally on the camera.
- Captures an image and publishes it in the namespace specified by the request message. Returns the timestamp.
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<<TracLink(ros-pkg camera_drivers)>>
