Video Streaming

The Trunk robot is equipped with a camera that can be used to stream video data to a remote computer. This can be useful for teleoperation, data collection, or other applications. The video stream is published as a ROS2 topic, which can be subscribed to by other nodes in the ROS2 network.

Usage

To start the video stream, run the following command on the PI:

cd cam_ws
source install/setup.bash
ros2 run v4l2_camera v4l2_camera_node --ros-args -p image_size:=[1920,1080]

This will start the video stream and publish the video data on the /image topic, and compressed video data on the /image/compressed topic. To alter for instance the frame rate or resolution, simply add the arguments as:

ros2 run v4l2_camera v4l2_camera_node --ros-args -p image_size:=[1920,1080] -p framerate:=15

To subscribe to the video stream, run the following command on the remote computer inside any ROS2 workspace:

ros2 run rqt_image_view rqt_image_view

and select the appropriate topic to view the video stream, e.g. /image/theora. This can also be viewed directly with all the other data, as described in the telemetry viewer page.