Ximea Camera ROS2 Driver

This repo aims provides a generic ROS2 driver for the XIMEA MQ022CG-CM camera. The repo was adapted from wavelab's ROS1 version. And so credit is given to this version for much of the code and convention in this driver.

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Prerequisites

ROS2

• Tested on ROS2 foxy

• Using eCAL RWM as an alternative to ROS2 DDS implementations showed significant perfomance improvements

Ximea SDK

Installed and tested on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

OPTIONAL: For full installation and setup, you could simply run the bash script: ximea_install.sh. Make sure you have the limits.txt file in the same directory. Also checkout the docker file for possible use with ROS2 Humble using the nvidia-isaac-ros docker workspace.

Download and extract the most recent software package:

$ cd ~; mkdir tmp; cd tmp
$ wget https://www.ximea.com/downloads/recent/XIMEA_Linux_SP.tgz

$ tar xzf XIMEA_Linux_SP.tgz
$ cd package

Install the package depending on you camera type

$ ./install -<type>

types:

-cam_usb30
-pcie

Add user to the pugdev group:

$ sudo gpasswd -a $USER plugdev

Set the USB FS memory allocation to infinite for sufficient buffering size for high bandwith USB3.0 streams:

$ echo 0 > /sys/module/usbcore/parameters/usbfs_memory_mb
# You can put this line to your bashrc file to apply to every new shell

Set realtime priority by putting the following to /etc/security/limits.conf:

*               -       rtprio          0
@realtime       -       rtprio          81
*               -       nice            0
@realtime       -       nice            -16

then add the user to realtime

$ sudo groupadd realtime #if it doesn't exist yet
$ sudo gpasswd -a $USER realtime

You may need to reboot your system for some changes to take effect.

Running the ros package

clone this repo to your ros2 workspace source directory:

$ cd ~/ros2_ws
$ git clone https://github.com/African-Robotics-Unit/ximea_ROS2_driver.git
$ cd ~/ros2_ws/ximea_ROS2_driver
$ colcon build --packages-select ximea_ros2_cam

Modify camera parameters as desired in the config and launch files, and run the node using the provided launch file or a custom one.

Launching the camera:

$ ros2 launch ximea_ros2_cam xiCam.launch.xml

# To view the stream
$ ros2 run rqt_image_view rqt_image_view

NOTE: Ximea API's demosaic color defect correction is not optimized for ARM processors, and so performance may degrade significantly. To avoid this you can instead capture raw 8-bits or 16-bits images (by setting the format parameter to RAW8 or RAW16 in the config file) and post-process later using the API's offline processing.