bvh_broadcaster

ROS wiki

bvh_broadcaster: broadcasting bvh motion capture as tf in ROS

Overview

This package broadcasts BVH files (a motion capture data format) as TF transfromations.

Data input

Input contains two string parameters:

• A path to BVH file, e.g., example.bvh
• A name of frame for motion capture to be loaded on, e.g., “world” frame, or “odom” frame.

You can find relevant BVH-formatted CMU MoCap from this post. Get BVH-formatted motion capture data from here.

Usage

python bvh_broadcaster.py [-h] [-n NAME] [-l] bvh_file base_frame

positional arguments:
  bvh_file              A path to bvh file that you want to broadcast
  base_frame            An existing frame in rviz on which the skeleton will
                        be loaded

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -n NAME, --name NAME  Node name, default: BVHBroadcaster
  -l, --loop            Loop broadcasting

For example:

# add execution access
chmod +x scripts/bvh_broadcaster.py
# loop broadcasting bvh to world frame
python scripts/bvh_broadcaster.py example/13_14.bvh world -l

Now, you can view the result in rviz:

The original actor and BVH file are as follows:

BVH resources for Motion Capture

CMU provides a lot of useful motion capture data, see CMU MoCap. Nevertheless, these data are not presented in BVH format. You can find relevant BVH-formatted CMU MoCap from this post.