It’s finally time to connect the camera now that the UP board is set up. To connect the camera just use the cable provided in the box with the USB3 adapter already connected to the UP board.

The size of the camera is impressive! It’s very slim and can be attached to a surface using the strong magnet provided.

Intel RealSenseR200 camera

Intel RealSense camera with mounting magnet

Launch ROS nodelet

• Start the roscore service by typing this command into the terminal: roscore &
• Change directory to the realsense_camera folder: roscd realsense_camera
• Start the roslauch server which launches nodelet: roslaunch realsense_camera r200_nodelet_default.launch & . If this nodelet crashed, you will get a camera not detected error message. Make sure the USB 3 cable is firmly connected.
• Run the camera node: rosrun tf static_transform_publisher 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 map camera_link 100 &

Launch RViz visualiser

Once roscore is running on the UP board, you can choose to run RViz either on the UP board itself or from a remote computer. RViz is a visualiser that can display the camera and depth image streaming from the RealSense R200 3D camera.

The nodelet name for the Intel RealSense R200 camera is R200Nodelet (you can use this to create your own launch files later). To get started, try: rosrun rviz rviz -d $(rospack find realsense_camera)/rviz/realsenseRvizConfiguration1.rviz

This will open RViz and you can view the pointcloud!

The Intel RealSense Robotic Development Kit tutorial provides more examples.

Dealing with ROS nodelet crashes

If nodelet crashes, the camera will no longer be detected.Here are some temporary fixes that worked for me:

• To start afresh, kill the roscore process using: killall -9 roscore and killall -9 rosmaster.