Bill,
In general the image_transport infrastructure is recommended for all this
http://www.ros.org/wiki/image_transport I put more specific info inline
below.

Tully

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 2:18 AM, Bill Morris <morris@ee.ccny.cuny.edu>wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Right now I have a camera on a robot running ROS, and I'm trying to
> figure out how to set things up to meet my needs.
>
> 1) The robot currently has a USB camera but may need to use Firewire in
> the future. Ideally whatever solution should work for both cases. The
> baseline requirement is to get a 320x240x10fps color video or image
> stream.
>
> There is support for a number of cameras.  The number and type I am not
sure of right now.  This is probably the biggest hurdle at the moment.  I'm
not sure which drivers to recommend for a usb camera, there are 3 or 4
different drivers in the system.

2) I have 1-2 vision tasks I would like to be performed locally on the
> robot.
>

 It is a ROS transport which allows local and remote access

>
> 3) I would like to transmit the video/image stream to a ground station
> using TCP/IP so I don't have multiple radios on the robot.
>

 There is compression available for transmitting offboard the robot.


> 4) The ground station should be able to display the video/images and
> perform computer vision tasks on the data.
>
> As long as it has network connection that will be fine.


> 5) The video should be logged for disk so that it can be fed back into
> the system for debugging.
>

All ROS logging infrastructure works with the image_transport, including
logging and playback from bag files.


>
> --
Tully Foote
Systems Engineer
Willow Garage, Inc.
tfoote@willowgarage.com
(650) 475-2827