[ros-users] call for an official ROS USB camera package

[Jack O'Quin]

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 4:26 PM, Bill Morris <morris at ee.ccny.cuny.edu> wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-06-03 at 20:33 -0500, Jack O'Quin wrote:
>> Not being a USB camera user, myself, I am not sure what the status of
>> the various driver packages are.
>>
>> Is there one particular version most people use?
>
> I have been using a customized version of usb_cam
> http://www.ros.org/wiki/usb_cam but I think Ken's uvc_camera is a bit
> further along. http://www.ros.org/wiki/uvc_camera
>
> There may be a license issue with the GPL vs BSD.

That issue arose with camera1394 when I made a nodelet implementation
for Diamondback. For that package, we asked all the contributors to
agree to changing the license to LGPL, which seems adequate.

BSD would be best.

>> > I would like to see a system for storing camera calibrations based on
>> The camera_info_manager URL supports any naming scheme desired.
>
> I would like to propose that cameras that can not store calibrations in
> memory store the calibrations in $ROS_HOME/calibration/driver-id.cal
>
> For a USB camera the id could be constructed from the VID/PID/Serial
> number to create a mostly unique identifier.
>
>  idVendor           0x046d Logitech, Inc.
>  idProduct          0x0821
>  iSerial                 1
>
> ~/.ros/calibration/usb_camera-046d08210001.cal

If no ~camera_info_url is specified, we currently use
"file:///tmp/calibration_${CAMERA_NAME}.yaml".

$ROS_HOME would probably be a better choice than /tmp. It's a small
API change, but unlikely to cause much grief.

I wouldn't want to override a user-specified URL, however.
-- 
 joq