https://github.com/ctu-mrs/libcamera_ros
libcamera is a new software library aimed at supporting complex camera systems directly from the Linux operating system. It enables us to drive the Raspberry Pi camera system directly from open-source code running on Arm processors. The proprietary code running on the Broadcom GPU, to which users have no access, is almost completely bypassed.
libcamera presents a C++ API to applications. It works at the level of configuring the camera and then allowing an application to request image frames. These image buffers reside in system memory and can be passed directly to still image encoders (such as JPEG) or to video encoders (such as h.264). Ancillary functions such as encoding images or displaying them are beyond the purview of libcamera itself.
This package does the wrapping for ROS.
Check the configuration file for available control parameters: config.yaml.
The libcamera library is required to be installed and in the present path (must be findable by CMake). Installation instructions:
- Enable installation from MRS PPA README.md. The stable PPA version is recommended.
- install libcamera package
sudo apt install ros-noetic-libcamera
Deb packages are available for arm64 and amd64 architectures. The driver is supposed to be used on arm64 (Raspberry Pi5). However, installing it on amd64 makes it easier to work with during development.
It was tested with ROS Noetic, but it should also work with older/newer versions.
Basic launch file without loading parameters from config file
roslaunch libcamera_ros basic.launch More complex launch file using the parameters from config file and namespace UAV.
roslaunch libcamera_ros uav.launch NOTE: This launch file also accepts custom_config argument to load a custom config file, that can override the default parameters.
The code was inspired by the driver for ROS2: https://github.com/christianrauch/camera_ros.