ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Using visual odometry with viso2

In order to use viso2, go to your catkin workspace (~/catkin_ws) and use the following commands:

    $ cdsrc
    $ wstoolinit
    $ wstool set viso2 --git git://github.com/srv/viso2.git
    $ wstool update  

Now, to build it, run the following command:

    $ cd ..
    $ catkin_make  

Once it is built, we set up our environment by using the following command:

    $ sourcedevel/setup.bash  

Now we can run viso2_ros nodes, such as stereo_odometer, which is the one we are going to use here. But before that, we need to publish the frame transformation between our camera and the robot or its base link. The stereo camera driver is already prepared for that, but we will explain how it is done in the following sections.