Greetings,
This past week I have worked on installation ROS (Robot Operating System) on our desktop in the Ars Geometrica Lab in ISAT. With the ROS installation complete and usable, I began focusing on getting the OpenNI_launch and OpenNI_camera nodes working together to produce visuals from the Asus Xtion Pro Live.
This was indeed more difficult then I anticipated due to all of the dependency and compatibility issues involved with the drivers for stereo cameras like the Xtion Pro Live. At the beginning of the week, I was not able to get the OpenNI_launch node to recognize the Xtion Pro Live through the USB connection to the desktop; however, I was able to fix this issue with dependency management and now the module launch node recognizes that the Xtion is plug in and can retrieve data from it.
The only catch here is that there are two strange warnings produced that I looked into regarding two configuration yaml files that are not located in the correct spot for camera calibration prior to opening the video stream.
These are the errors that I was receiving:
I felt like these might have something to do with why the camera stream was not visible in ROS, so I kept digging and found that I needed to intrinsically calibrate the camera to see its stream.
After running this command, an image viewer popped up and I was able to see a colorful image through the Xtion Pro Live. So, this lead me to believe that I needed to calibrate the camera in order to visualize it through ROS’s rviz which is there 3D visualizer.
A quick reminder, the goal right now is to be able to visualize point clouds in rviz using the Xtion Pro Live. This should be simple once the camera is recognized within the rviz environment.
Currently, within rviz, I am running into an issue with the global fixed frame. It has an error associated with it that I was not able to figure out with the time spent this week; however, I do have an inclination as to what could be causing the error. It seems to be that when you run:
In ROS, this initializes rviz as well so something with the configuration from the openni.launch in rviz could be trigger the error. So with this in mind, the goal for next week is to get rviz and OpenNI_Launch working together in order to begin visualizing point clouds within rviz.
Thanks,
Adam Slattum
1) ROS RVIZ
Ars Geometrica 