ROS Cameras Controller

Overview

ROS Cameras Controller uses streamed videos and helps to manage them.

The project consists of these ROS packages (more details in readme files of each package):

• commander - handles requests made by other packages.
• image_processing_filters - allows to apply image processing filter to ROS image topics.
• video_stream_to_topic - converts video stream (e.g. from IP camera) and converts it to ROS image topic.
• web_console - runs web consoles for managing cameras. It uses Flask for app back-end and AngularJS for front-end.

Architecture

Development

Dependencies

• Robot Operating System (ROS) (Middleware for Robotics).
• OpenCV (Computer Vision).
• Flask (Back-End App).
• AngularJS (Front-End App).
• npm (Front-End Package Manager).

Building (simple)

To build, clone the latest version from this repository into your catkin workspace and compile the package using:

cd catkin_workspace/src
git clone https://github.com/ugnelis/ros_cameras_controller.git
cd ../
catkin_make

Building (detailed)

1. Install Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, ROS Kinetic and OpenCV 3.1+.

2. Make sure that ROS environment is setup: link.

3. Install web_video_server:

sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-web-video-server

4. Install rosbridge-suite:

sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-rosbridge-suite

5. Install NodeJS and npm:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

6. Install Flask:

sudo pip install Flask

7. Create catkin workspace for storing ROS source projects:

mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src
cd ~/catkin_ws/
catkin_make

8. Source catkin workspace:

source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash

(Recommended) It's convenient if catkin workspace environment variables are automatically added to your bash session every time a new shell is launched:

echo "source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

9. Clone this project to ~/catkin_ws/src:

cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/ugnelis/ros_cameras_controller.git
cd ../
catkin_make

10. (First build only) If ros_cameras_controller packages aren't found, reopen terminal or source catkin workspace again:

source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash

Running (production)

1. Start the commander package:

roslaunch commander commander.launch

2. Start the web_console package:

roslaunch web_console web_console.launch

3. web_console is now running on http://localhost:9999.

Running (production, Docker)

1. Build Docker image:

docker build -t ros-cam .

2. Create a Docker network:

docker network create ros-cam-net

3. Start commander:

docker run -dit --rm \
  --net ros-cam-net \
  --name commander \
  ros-cam \
  commander commander.launch

4. Start web_console:

docker run -dit --rm \
  --net ros-cam-net \
  --name web_console \
  --env ROS_MASTER_URI=http://commander:11311 \
  -p 8888:8888 -p 9090:9090 -p 9999:9999 \
  ros-cam \
  web_console web_console.launch

Running (development)

1. Open first terminal and run commander package:

roslaunch commander commander.launch

2. Open second terminal and run rosbridge_server package:

roslaunch rosbridge_server rosbridge_websocket.launch

3. Open third terminal and run web_video_server package:

rosrun web_video_server web_video_server _port:=8888

roscd web_console/src/front_end_app
npm start

Testing

The web_console package has been tested under ROS Kinetic and Ubuntu 16.04.

License

The source code is released under the BSD 3-Clause license.

Author: Ugnius Malūkas

Maintainer: Ugnius Malūkas, ugnius@malukas.lt