Interfacing lepton camera with ROS

[Akshay Bharadwaj]

Hey,

I am using a raspberry pi model B with ubuntu trusty and ROS indigo installed. I'm trying to interface the Lepton sensors with ROS. Could any one point me in the right direction to go about? Has any one had problems / success with it. Anything helps. I'm able to compile the example code have the Lepton sensor working with the PI with the raspberrypi_video application.

Thank You.

[Péter Kopiás]

Hi.

 You'll have to write a simple ros publisher node, where you create an rgb bitmap image in memory (from the 14 bits grayscale input), then publish it like a webcam driver would.

 Also you might wait for the guys working on the video4linux drivers, and when it happens you can use the ros webcam drivers probably, but those don't really like the 16bits of grey, so some tweaking might be needed.

 We've had problems with ros on the raspi, so we dropped that, and used a TI microcontroller, rosserial and an odroid to get the lepton and other sensors work, but I won't recommend this way, as it took a few months for three guys to get everything together.

 Peter

[Rohan Bhargava]

Hi,

This is a working ROS interface for Lepton. https://github.com/PX4/Lepton.

I have tried it with Raspberry pi model B and it works. 

Cheers

Rohan

[Konstantinos Panayiotou]

Hello,

We have developed a ROS-package for interfacing with Flir-Lepton LWIR sensor on a raspberry Pi 2 and also provides some thermal image processing functionalities.

This has been tested on RoboCup 2015 competition (Hefei-China) with good results on providing thermal sources of interest in a configurable range of degrees.

We are currently working on a release version of the package and also documentation on how to use it. I assume we will able to release the package in public by August 15.

Do not hesitate to ask for further information.

On behalf of Pandora Robotics Team

[Akshay Bharadwaj]

Hey,

I have tried and used it, but for some reason it fails during the message exchange.  To be very particular the transfer() function. Did u have similar problems? I have ubuntu 14.04 LTS installed on rasp_pi 2.

Thanks

[Akshay Bharadwaj]

Hey guys,

I am able to publish the data as mono8 encoding, since the actual bit resolution is 14 bits, I'm reducing the dynamic range of the image to 8bits, there is extreme loss of details. While trying to publish it as mono 16, the image is published, but when i try to view it in rviz, its says " Error loading image: OGRE EXCEPTION(2:InvalidParametersException): Stream size does not match calculated image size in Image::loadRawData" . Has anyone faced this problem? I also have a problem of image overlapping when i move towards the left. The image quality is really bad.

Please find the bag at :https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B76uFPN0bZoWUExKNDJmb3JDZGc/view?usp=sharing
(Sorry, attachment was big to attach in the post)
 View in rviz as image (not camera). in the bag, its me, then i get a hot coffee cup (the whole image goes dark grey), towards the end, a hot soldering gun (the whole screen goes black).