The RealSense cameras are widely used on robots which often have to venture outdoors. Using any camera outdoors can pose some challenges with glare from sunlight. The RealSense D435 camera's default settings work quite well outdoors. This is however not the case for the older R200 cameras. This tutorial outlines how to optimise the R200…Read more Optimising the RealSense R200 camera for outdoor use
Computer Vision
Running the RealSense R200 camera with librealsense and pyrealsense legacy libraries
The legacy Intel RealSense cameras such as the R200/F200/SR300/LR200/ZR300 can be challenging to work with because support is limited. Documentation is sparse, so this tutorial provides a step by step guide for installing librealsense and pyrealsense for running the older RealSense R200 camera in ROS or natively in Python. Install librealsense The first part of…Read more Running the RealSense R200 camera with librealsense and pyrealsense legacy libraries
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
When the RealSense stops connecting
The RealSense D435 RGBD camera is generally very robust and reliable. It can however fail to connect and display the image and depth frames. When this happens, hardware notification errors appear in the realsense-viewer software as shown below. Usually this is caused by a connection issue, such as trying to use USB 2 with the RealSense,…Read more When the RealSense stops connecting
3D Computer Vision in ROS
The RealSense D435 camera can be readily set up to publish all the image and pointcloud streams via ROS topics. For an in-depth setup, read Integrating the Intel RealSense D435 with ROS. Once this data becomes available in ROS, processing it via custom nodes requires a larger ROS ecosystem for perception. Three popular 2D/3D computer…Read more 3D Computer Vision in ROS
Integrating the Intel RealSense D435 with ROS
The Intel RealSense D435 is the latest RGBD camera available from Intel, and is an upgrade from the Intel R200 camera already discussed in a previous post. The D435 is a stereo depth camera that is designed to work both indoors and outdoors. The 3D reconstruction is constructed using active Infrared (IR) stereo. The camera is…Read more Integrating the Intel RealSense D435 with ROS
How the Intel RealSense R200 camera works
The Intel RealSense R200 is a USB powered long range stereoscopic camera that can be used for robotics and HCI computer vision applications. About the camera The camera consists of two infrared and one full HD colour imaging sensors, as well as an infrared laser projection system. As a result, the camera provides three video…Read more How the Intel RealSense R200 camera works
Robotics. And other stuff too. 