About

This repository contains ROS 1 and ROS 2 drivers for the CANLAB CLPE-G-Series system. CLPE-G-Series is a multi camera grabber board for N2.0 GMSL camera. This drivers exposes camera images and information from CLPE-G-Series as ROS messages using the image_transport framework.

This branch contains the ROS 2 driver. For the ROS 1 driver, please switch to the noetic branch.

System Requirements

Requirements:

• CANLAB CLPE-G-Series with supplied PC running Ubuntu 20.04
• CLPE_G_Series_SDK
• ROS 2 Foxy or ROS 2 Galactic

Note: It is strongly recommended to install Ubuntu 20.04 on the PC shipped with CLPE-G-Series. This way ROS 2 binaries can be installed as debian packages. If the PC is running Ubuntu 18.04, ROS 2 will need to be built from source which is not officially supported on Ubuntu 18.04. Alternatively, containers or VM may be used but the CLPE-G-Series drivers has to be properly passed through.

Setup

System dependencies

sudo apt update && sudo apt install git cmake wget gcc g++ libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev python3-colcon* python3-rosdep python3-vcstool -y

ROS 2 Installation

Depending on the version of Ubuntu installed, follow the instructions in the links above to install ROS 2 binaries or from source. To source ROS 2

source /opt/ros/foxy/setup.bash # if binaries are installed
source ~/ros2_foxy/install/setup.bash # if installed from source following link above

Note: Replace foxy with galactic if using ROS 2 Galactic

Install CLPE SDK and ROS 2 Driver

Create workspace

mkdir -p ~/ws_clpe2/src
cd ~/ws_clpe2/
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/canlab-co/clpe_ros/main/clpe.repos
vcs import src < clpe.repos

Install dependencies

cd ~/ws_clpe2
# source your ROS 2 workspace before this command
sudo rosdep init # if you have not done this before
rosdep update
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro $ROS_DISTRO -y

Build the driver

cd ~/ws_clpe2
# source your ROS 2 workspace if you have not already
colcon build --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
# To also build the benchmarking scripts
colcon build --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCLPE_ROS_BUILD_BENCHMARKS=On

Run the driver

DDS Configuration

For better image transport performance over DDS, we recommend using FastDDS with Shared Memory Transport enabled. First copy the the fastdds.xml config file to a suitable directory, eg. $HOME/fastdds.xml

cd ~/ws_clpe2/src
cp canlab-co/clpe_ros/fastdds.xml ~/

Next add these two lines to your ~/.bashrc

export RMW_IMPLEMENTATION=rmw_fastrtps_cpp
export FASTRTPS_DEFAULT_PROFILES_FILE=$HOME/fastdds.xml

Make sure to source ~/.bashrc first on all terminals before launching any ROS 2 nodes including the driver.

Launch

cd ~/ws_clpe2
source install/setup.bash
** UYVY **
ros2 launch clpe_ros clpe_ros.launch.py password:=<sudo-password> slave:=n encoding:=yuv422 timestamp:=xavier
** JPEG **
ros2 launch clpe_ros clpe_ros.launch.py password:=<sudo-password> slave:=n encoding:=jpeg timestamp:=local

Note: If sudo_password is a number, say 42, you should pass it as password:=\'42\'
If you have not equipped slave CLPE-G-Series, you should enter slave:=n

By default the driver will publish topics per camera X.

• /clpe/cam_X/image_raw: The raw image published as sensor_msgs::msg::Image.
• /clpe/cam_X/compressed: The JPEG image published as sensor_msgs::msg::CompressedImage.
• The default encoding is yuv422. For other supported encodings, see Configuration below.

ROS2 Component

The driver is also supported as a ROS2 component. To run it, start the component container

ros2 run rclcpp_components component_container

In another terminal, load the component

ros2 component load /ComponentManager clpe_ros clpe::ClpeComponentNode -p password:=<password>

Check that the component is loaded with

ros2 component list

Configuration

The driver supports the following ROS parameters to configure its behavior. The password, slave, encoding and timestamp parameters can be overwritten at run time. Other parameters can be modified within the launch file.

Note: If encoding is “jpeg”, timestamp must be set to “local”.

Unless specified otherwise, all parameters are read-only, that is, they must be initialized at startup and cannot be changed at runtime.