[ros-users] Prosilica GC1020

[René Wagner]

Hi all,

I did some preliminary testing with the prosilica_node ROS driver and a
Prosilica GC2010 on Friday. The driver basically works but there are
some caveats:

First of all, the corresponding tutorial [1] contains launch files that
don't seem to match the software in C Turtle. The sample launch files
distributed along with the prosilica_camera package, however, work.

As for using the driver with the GC1020, I had to uncomment all calls to
cam_->setWhiteBalance(...) in prosilica_node.cpp to prevent the node
from getting stuck at this warning:

[ WARN] [1286554890.197190653]: Reconfigure callback failed with
exception Couldn't set white balance mode: Camera or attribute not
found: 

Could it be that some Prosilica models don't support automatic white
balancing? Could the driver handle this case more gracefully?

The driver also complains about not being able to read the intrinsics
from the camera. This is just a warning and I suspect its origin is the
fact that no intrinsic parameters have been written to the user memory
area yet.

Another issue was caused by the default packet filter ("firewall")
configuration in Fedora which leads to the subtle failure mode where
communication on the control port works but no images get through. I
eventually figured this out but a warning in the wiki documentation
might be useful.

Next on my list is getting two GC1020s to work in a stereo setup. I
don't know when I'll get around to that yet, though.

Cheers,

Rene

[1]
http://www.ros.org/wiki/prosilica_camera/Tutorials/DesktopProsilicaConfiguration

-- 
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Dipl.-Inf. René Wagner                     Junior Researcher
DFKI Bremen                           Enrique-Schmidt-Str. 5
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