vrpn_mocap

ROS2 VRPN client built pirmarily to interface with motion capture devices such as VICON and OptiTrack. A detailed list of supported hardware can be found on vrpn wiki.

Installation

Install From Binary Release

sudo apt install ros-<rosdistro>-vrpn-mocap

Build From Source

1. Clone this repo into your ROS2 workspace
2. Run rosdep install --from-paths src -y --ignore-src to install dependencies
3. Run colcon build
4. Your usual ROS2 routines: source install/setup.zsh, etc.

Usage

Launch Default Configuration from Command Line

Run the following command,

ros2 launch vrpn_mocap client.launch.yaml server:=<server ip> port:=<port>

replacing <server ip> and <port> with your VRPN server ip and port, e.g.

ros2 launch vrpn_mocap client.launch.yaml server:=192.168.0.4 port:=3883

Then with ros2 topic list, you should be able to see the following topics

/vrpn_mocap/<tracker_name>/pose
/vrpn_mocap/<tracker_name>/twist # optional when mocap reports velocity data
/vrpn_mocap/<tracker_name>/accel # optional when mocap reports acceleration data

where <tracker_name> is usually the name of your tracked objects.

Customized Launch

Check out the default parameter file and launch file. You can then write your own launch file with custom configurations.

Parameters

• server (string) -- server name, either ip address or domain name (default: "localhost")
• port (int) -- VRPN server port (default: 3883)
• frame_id (string) -- frame name of the fixed world frame (default: "world")
• update_freq (double) -- frequency of the motion capture data publisher (default: 100.)
• refresh_freq (double) -- frequency of dynamic adding new tracked objects (default: 1.)
• sensor_data_qos -- use best effort QoS for VRPN data stream, set to false to use system default QoS which is reliable (default: true)
• multi_sensor (bool) -- set to true if there are more than one sensor (frame) reporting on the same object (default: false)
• use_vrpn_timestamps (bool) -- use timestamps coming from VRPN. This ensures that the interval between frames timestamps is not modified (default: false)

Acknowledgement

Some ideas are borrowed from the well known vrpn_client_ros -- a ROS1 package for interfacing with VRPN devices. I thank the authors and developers for delivering and maintaining the original implementation.