Spinnaker camera node

Purpose / Use cases

We need a node that would use the Spinnaker camera driver to connect to Pointgrey/FLIR cameras and publish their images as ROS 2 messages.

Design

We inherit from the rclcpp::Node and link the publish_image function as a callback to a Spinnaker SDK wrapper.

Inputs / Outputs / API

The input is the images generated from the cameras and read by the driver. The driver will then make them available to this node.

Configuration

The node is configured through the parameters. Here is a short recap of the most important parts. For more details, see the spinnaker_camera_node.param.template.yaml file.

It can be used to run the node as follows:

ros2 run spinnaker_camera_nodes spinnaker_camera_node_main --ros-args --params-file ./install/spinnaker_camera_nodes/share/spinnaker_camera_nodes/param/spinnaker_camera_node.param.template.yaml

Configuring cameras

It supports two ways of configuration:

• providing a single instance of camera settings that will be used for all cameras.
• providing an instance of camera settings per camera. The number of these must match the number of available cameras.

Configuring publishers

If one_publisher_per_camera is set to true, there is going to be as many publishers as there are cameras, publishing on different topics. If set to false a single publisher with a single topic will be reused. The messages can be then discriminated on the basis of their frame_id.

Related issues

• #395 - Implement ROS 2 node for Spinnaker driver