avt_camera

Python Allied Vision Package

This package contains driver code for Allied Vision GigE cameras. It uses the pymba library for Python bindings of the Vimba library that is written in C.

Nodes

Single Camera

Just running the mono_camera.py node will print out all the available camera IDs and will attach the node to the first of those cameras. Alternatively, you can attach to a specific camera using:

rosrun avt_camera mono_camera.py _camera:=<cam_name> _camera_id:=<cam_id>

This will publish the camera stream to topic /camera/<cam_name>/image_raw and the camera info will be published to /camera/<cam_name>/camera_info.

The parameter <cam_name> is a string that represents the desired namespace of the camera and <cam_id> is a string that represents the unique id of the camera.

To run the right camera, you could run:

rosrun avt_camera mono_camera.py _camera:="right" _camera_id:="DEV_000F315C1ED5"

This will publish the camera stream to topic /camera/right/image_raw and the camera info will be published to /camera/right/camera_info.

To run the left camera, you could run:

rosrun avt_camera mono_camera.py _camera:="left" _camera_id:="DEV_000F315C1ED8"

This will publish the camera stream to topic /camera/left/image_raw and the camera info will be published to /camera/left/camera_info.

Stereo Camera

You can use the stereo_camera.py node to run stereo cameras, or anytime you need multiple cameras. Since the parameters can be quite long, we recommend using a launch file, such as the one provided, stereo_camera.launch. You can run the launch file using:

roslaunch avt_camera stereo_camera.launch

which will start stereo camera on the left and right cameras and will publish to /camera/left/image_raw, /camera/right/image_raw and the corresponding camera info topics.

This node requires two parameters for input, <camera> and <camera_id>. <camera> is a list of the names of the cameras that you wish to run. <camera_id> is a map with keys as the names of the cameras that are defined in the list <camera>, and with values being the corresponding IDs of the cameras.

In the same manner as the mono_camera.py node, the topics published will be /camera/<cam_name>/image_raw where <cam_name> is an element in <camera>, the names of the cameras. The camera info will also be published in a similar manner, at topic /camera/<cam_name>/camera_info. There will be as many topics published as there are elements in the <camera> list.

Structure

This package is composed of the following code.

• camera.py contains the Camera class, which creates a high level API for accessing camera data and wraps around the pymba library
• mono_camera.py is a script that contains the ROS node to drive a single camera
• stereo_camera.py is a script that contains the ROS node to asynchronously drive multiple cameras