A comprehensive guide to overcoming Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI): Part II

This three part series is a comprehensive guide to beating RSI with hardware, software, and physiotherapy exercise strategies. Part I outlined the hardware strategies so this article will focus on software interventions for overcoming  RSI. Regular breaks and rest The best way to combat repetitive strain injury is to interrupt the strain cycle by taking…Read more A comprehensive guide to overcoming Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI): Part II

A comprehensive guide to overcoming Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI): Part I

Writing algorithms for robots is fun, so fun that one can really loose track of time spent at a computer. Repetitive strain injury (RSI) is a gradual process of straining tendons and muscles in the wrist, hand and arm due to repetitive strenuous motions such as using a computer mouse or typing. This can result…Read more A comprehensive guide to overcoming Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI): Part I

Converting the KITTI dataset to rosbags

The KITTI Vision Benchmark Suite dataset is a popular robotics dataset from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Several benchmarking datasets are provided including stereo, flow, scene flow, depth, odomerty, object, tracking, road, semantics and the raw data. To use this dataset in ROS, the streams should first be converted to…Read more Converting the KITTI dataset to rosbags

Using the RealSense SDK to access the camera

The RealSense SDK provides an API for accessing the camera hardware directly. Accessing the camera via the SDK locks it, until access is released. This tutorial will cover how to use the RealSense SDK for C++ development using the simple example of accessing the camera's intrinsic calibration parameters. Recall that the intrinsic camera matrix for raw…Read more Using the RealSense SDK to access the camera

Working with 3D point clouds in ROS

A point cloud is a set of data points in 3D space. Such data is usually derived from time-of-flight, structured light or stereo reconstruction. Laser scanners such as the Hukuyo or Velodyne provide a planar scan or 3D coloured point cloud respectively. The perception_pcl package is the PCL ROS interface stack. A previous post covered how to integrate the Point…Read more Working with 3D point clouds in ROS

Updating the RealSense nodelet

The ROS Wrapper for Intel RealSense Devices provides a ROS nodelet interface between the camera and the ROS system. Intel updates this ROS package on a fairly regular basis, which could lead to API version mismatch errors. When this happens, the camera (sometimes) works fine on realsense-viewer but any code using the RealSense nodelet fails to compile.…Read more Updating the RealSense nodelet