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* https://github.com/magazino/pylon_camera

A ROS-Driver for Basler Cameras

developed by Magazino GmbH, using the pylon Software Camera Suite by Basler AG https://raw.githubusercontent.com/magazino/pylon_camera/indigo-devel/wiki_imgs/logos_small.png

Overview

This package offers many functions of the Basler pylon API inside the ROS-Framwork.

The package supports Baslers USB 3.0, GigE as well as the DART cameras.

Images can continuously be published over /image_raw or the /image_rect topic. The latter just in case the intrinsic calibration matrices are provided through the camera_info_url parameter.

The camera-characteristic parameter such as hight, width, projection matrices and camera_frame were published over the /camera_info topic. Furthermore an action-based image grabbing with desired exposure, gain, gamma and / or brightness is provided. Hence one can grab a sequence of images with above target settings as well as a single image.

Adapting camera's settings regarding binning (in x and y direction), exposure, gain, gamma and brightness can be done using provided set_* services. These changes effect the continuous image acquisition and hence the images provided through the image topics.

The default node operates in Software-Trigger Mode. This means that the image acquisition is triggered with a certain rate and the camera is not running in the continuous mode.

The package opens either a predefined camera (using a given 'device_user_id' parameter) or, if no camera id is predefined the first camera device it can find.

Installation

The package has been tested for ROS-Indigo and ROS-Kinetic. For other ROS versions than Indigo, please replace 'indigo' with your installed ROS-version in the following install instructions.

The pylon_camera-pkg requires the pylonSDK to be installed on your system. Please download and install the pylon debian package for your architecture from:

https://www.baslerweb.com/de/support/downloads/downloads-software/

In order to build the package, you need to configure rosdep (i.e. the ROS command-line tool for checking and installing system dependencies for ROS packages) such that it knows how to resolve this dependency. This can be achieved by executing the following commands:

sudo sh -c 'echo "yaml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/magazino/pylon_camera/indigo-devel/rosdep/pylon_sdk.yaml " > /etc/ros/rosdep/sources.list.d/15-plyon_camera.list'

rosdep update

Then, clone the pylon_camera-pkg, and the camera_control_msgs-pkg and install all necessary dependencies via rosdep install:

cd ~/catkin_ws/src/ && git clone https://github.com/magazino/pylon_camera.git && git clone https://github.com/magazino/camera_control_msgs.git

rosdep install --from-paths . --ignore-src --rosdistro=$ROS_DISTRO -y

Build the pylon_camera package as you would build a standard ROS-package using p.e.

cd ~/catkin_ws && catkin_make

Parameters

All parameters are listed in the default config file: config/default.yaml

Common parameters

- camera_frame

- device_user_id

- camera_info_url

- binning_x & binning_y

- frame_rate

Image Intensity Settings

The following settings do NOT have to be set. Each camera has default values which provide an automatic image adjustment resulting in valid images

- exposure

- gain

- gamma

- brightness

- brightness_continuous

- exposure_auto & gain_auto

Optional and device specific parameter

- gige/mtu_size

- gige/inter_pkg_delay

Usage

Make sure you have the catkin_ws sourced:

source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash

The pylon_camera_node can be started over the launch file which includes a config file with desired parameters as frame rate or exposure time

roslaunch pylon_camera pylon_camera_node.launch

or

rosrun pylon_camera pylon_camera_node

Images were only published if another node connects to the image topic. The published images can be seen using the image_view node from the image_pipeline stack:

rosrun image_view image_view image:=/pylon_camera_node/image_raw

Questions

Please provide your qustions via http://answers.ros.org/questions/ and tag them with 'pylon_camera'


2023-10-28 12:56