ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

USB cameras

Now we are going to do the same thing with USB cameras. The only problem is that, surprisingly, they are not inherently supported by ROS. First of all, once you have connected the camera to the computer, test it with a chat or video meeting program, for example, Skype or Cheese. The camera resource should appear in /dev/video?, where ? should be a number starting with 0 (that may be your internal webcam if you are using a laptop).

There are two main options that deserve to be mentioned as possible USB camera drivers for ROS. First, we have usb_cam. To install it, use the following command:

    $ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-usb-cam  

Then, run the following command:

    $ roslaunch chapter5_tutorials usb_cam.launch view:=true