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.