ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Performing visual odometry with viso2 with a stereo camera

Finally, we can do what viso2_demo does with our own stereo pair. We only have to run the following command to run the stereo odometry and see the results in rqt_rviz (note that the tf tree is published by default):

    $ roslaunch chapter5_tutorials camera_stereo.launch odometry:=true    rviz:=true  

The following image shows an example of the visual odometry system running for our low-cost stereo camera. If you move the camera, you should see the /odom frame moving. If the calibration is bad or the cameras are very noisy, the odometer may get lost, which is indicated by a warning message on the terminal. In that case, you should look for better cameras or recalibrate them to see whether ...