astra_launch and astra_camera packages. Problems with RGB

Question

Hello all;

I have recently purchased an Orbbec Astra Pro sensor as a substitute for the difficult to get Asus Xtion Pro Live. I have installed astra_launch and astra_camera packages. As the sensor was not recognized, I have also run the install.sh script from the astra_camera source code in GitHub.

Now, when I run the sensor with roslaunch astra_launch astra.launch the sensor is recognized and in Rviz, I can see depth images, ir_images and pointclouds, but I do not receive RGB images. The topics corresponding to the RGB images are present, but they are not publishing anything.

Is this problem known? Any way to solve it?

I would appreciate any kind of advise or help...

Best regards,

Alberto

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Originally posted by altella on ROS Answers with karma: 149 on 2016-10-27

Post score: 1

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Original comments

Comment by jljess01 on 2017-01-04:
Just purchased a Turtlebot 2 from Clearpath Robotics. It came with the Astra sensor installed. However, I too am having trouble with RGB images as described above.

When I use image_view I do not have an rgb image available.

Answer 1

I had the same issue as astra pro is what came with my Turtlebot 2 that I ordered from Clearpath Robotics.

My setup: Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS running ROS Indigo

The launch package that allowed me to have both depth and rgb is astra_pro.launch found here: https://github.com/clearpathrobotics/ros_astra_launch/tree/upstream/launch

The help at clearpath was superb! Directions I received are as follows(You can edit the directories as you wish of course):

mkdir -p turtlebot_ws/src
cd turtlebot_ws/src
catkin_init_ws
git clone https://github.com/tonybaltovski/ros_astra_launch.git --branch upstream
git clone https://github.com/tonybaltovski/ros_astra_camera.git --branch upstream
cd ..
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro=indigo -y
catkin_make
source devel/setup.bash
rosrun astra_camera create_udev_rules
(you may need to reboot here)
roslaunch astra_launch astra_pro.launch

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Originally posted by surfertas with karma: 265 on 2017-05-02

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 4

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Original comments

Comment by surfertas on 2017-05-03:
In order for RViz to successfully subscribe to the RGB image topic, you need to take further steps to calibrate your camera, and generate a yaml file. Ive tried to document the steps here http://surfertas.github.io/rviz/turtlebot/2017/05/03/turtlebot-astrapro.html.

Answer 2

You probably bought an "Astra Pro" camera, not a regular "Astra". The Astra Pro camera doesn't have an RGB camera that's integrated with OpenNI2. Instead, it has a regular Video4Linux webcam. This means that from ROS's point of view, there are two completely separate devices: One OpenNI2 depth camera without RGB (that's launched via astra.launch), and one V4L camera (you can use the usb_cam ROS driver for this).

This is the output of an Astra Pro:

$ lsusb
[...]
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 2bc5:0403  
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 2bc5:0501  
[...]

The 2bc5:0403 device is the OpenNI2 depth camera, the 2bc5:0501 device is the regular Video4Linux/UVC RGB webcam.

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Originally posted by Martin Günther with karma: 11816 on 2017-01-23

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 2