ROS Driver for Motion Capture Systems

 

This package contains ROS drivers for two different motion capture systems,VICON And QUALISYS.

License

For the VICON driver, we use the offical SDK.

For the QUALISYS driver, we use the interface from Qualisys2Ros.

For the rest of the software, the license is Apache 2.0 wherever not specified.

Compiling

This is a catkin package. Make sure the package is on ROS_PACKAGE_PATH after cloning the package to your workspace. Drivers for different motion capture system can be independently compiled.

cd your_work_space
catkin_make --pkg mocap_{sys} --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

This will compile the drivers for {sys}

Example Usage

Common Parameters

server (string)

Address of the server of the motion capture system to be connected.

frame_rate (int, default: 100)

The frame rate of the motion capture system

max_accel (double, default: 10.0)

The max possible acceleration which serves to construct the noise parameters.

publish_tf (bool, default: false)

If set to true, tf msgs for the subjects are published.

fixed_frame_id (string, mocap)

The fixed frame ID of the tf msgs for each subject. Note that the child frame id is automatically set to the name of the subject.

model_list (vector<string>, default: [])

A vector of subjects of interest. Leave the vector empty if all subjects are to be tracked.

Published Topics

/{mocap_sys}/{subject_name}/odom (nav_msgs/Odometry)

Odometry message for each specified subject in model_list.

To be compatible with the name of the topics published of vicon_odom in vicon repo of KumarRobotics, you can uncomment the following line in the launch file: <remap from="{mocap_sys}/{subject_name}/odom" to="/{subject_name}/odom">

Node

roslaunch {mocap_sys} {sys}.launch

For example,

roslaunch mocap_vicon vicon.launch

FAQ

1. Will the msgs be delayed if the driver is handling several subjects? The driver is multi-threaded. It uses different threads to process the msg from different subjects. So, emmmmm, don't worry =).

2. How to calibrate the transformation between the subject frame (centered at the centroid of the markers) and the body frame of a robot? This functionality is not provided, since few people use that now. If you really want that, please consider vicon repo of KumarRobotics or vicon_bridge repo of ethz-asl.

Bug Report

Prefer to open an issue. You can also send an e-mail to sunke.polyu@gmail.com.

OSX Support

You will need to compile ROS from source for OSX first. The vicon node is supported, but the qualisys node is not. There are no current plans to extend compatibility to OSX for the qualisys driver.