Vicon receiver for ROS2

ros2-vicon-receiver is a ROS2 package, written in C++, that retrieves data from Vicon software and publishes it on ROS2 topics. The code is partly derived from a mixture of Vicon-ROS2 and Vicon bridge .

This is NOT an official ROS2 package and is not supported. The package has been successfully tested with ROS2 Dashing Diademata, ROS2 Foxy and ROS2 Galactic on the operating systems Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver, Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa and MacOS 10.13 High Sierra.

Installation of ROS2

If ROS2 is already installed, you can skip this section

Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver

If you are using Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver, you can install all the dependencies by simply cd'ing into the main project folder and then running

$ ./install_ubuntu_bionic.sh

Ubuntu 20.04 Foxy Focal

If you are using Ubuntu 20.04 Foxy Focal, you can install all the dependencies by simply cd'ing into the main project folder and then running

$ ./install_ros2_foxy.sh

Installation of Datastream SDK and other libraries

The Datastream SDK libraries are required to be installed in the system. You can find them on the official website.

This package is shipped with Datastream SDK 10.1 (the latest version at the time of writing). If you are running Linux x64 and you want to install this version, simply cd into the main project folder and issue the command

$ ./install_libs.sh

Quick start

Building the package

⚠️ Do not forget to source the ROS2 workspace: source /opt/ros/dashing/setup.bash or source /opt/ros/foxy/setup.bash

Build the executable

$ colcon build --symlink-install

Running the program

Open a new terminal and source the project workspace:

$ source install/setup.bash

To run the program, use the launch file template provided in the package. First, open the file and edit the parameters. The hostname of the motion capture computer in RoMeLa is 192.168.200.101 while it is connected to the Robocup network. If this setup changes, you must change this setting. Running colcon build is not needed because of the --symlink-install option previously used.

Now you can launch the program with

$ ros2 launch vicon_receiver client.launch.py

Checking the topics

In another terminal, source the ROS2 workspace with

$ source install/setup.bash

If the Vicon motion capture software is running on the RoMeLa computer, then you can see the topics using:

$ ros2 topic list

Exit the program with CTRL+C.

Information on ROS2 topics and messages

The ros2-vicon-receiver package creates a topic for each segment in each subject with the pattern namespace/subject_name/segment_name. Information is published on the topics as soon as new data is available from the vicon client (typically at the vicon client frequency). Two topics will be published for each subject: the centroidal position of the object based on the markers under namespace/subject_name/subject_name with message type Position and a list of marker positions uner namespace/subject_name/markers with message type MarkerPositions and

For the current implementation in RoMeLA, the default namespace vicon will be used. If you have two subjects (subject_1 and subject_2, then, the topic published will be as follows:

vicon/subject_1/subject_1
vicon/subject_1/markers
vicon/subject_2/subject_2
vicon/subject_2/markers

Contributors

ros2-vicon-receiver is developed by Andrea Camisa, Andrea Testa and Giuseppe Notarstefano

Acknowledgements

This result is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 638992 - OPT4SMART).