Phone Camera to Screen Demo

Publishing your Android webcam to Baxter's screen

The general idea is to download an app on your phone that grabs your phone's webcam, transforms it into a ROS image message, connects to your ROS master on Baxter, then publishes the compressed image as a ROS topic. Then you need to grab that compressed image, convert it into a raw_image, and republish it to the screen display topic.

Raw Steps

1. Install the camera driver on your android.

   1. Install OpenCV, following the directions here (optional?): OpenCV Manager
   2. Install the app from Google Play: android-camera-viewer from JSK Robotics Laboratory

2. Install the image_transport_plugins on your development machine: $ sudo apt-get install ros-electric-image-transport-plugins

3. Figure out the ip address of your Baxter $ avahi-resolve-host-name baxter.local 192.169.33.77

4. Launch your app and enter the ip address in place of the 'localhost' part.

5. On your dev machine:

    # start up your init'd environment
    $ ./init 192.168.33.77
    $ rostopic list /camera
    /camera/camera_info
    /camera/image/compressed
    # start image_viewer with appropriate compression, 
    #  Note /compressed is a transport of the /camera/image image topic
    $ rosrun image_view image_view image:=/camera/image compressed &

4. NEXT: use republish to echo your images
   $ rosrun image_transport republish compressed in:=/camera/image raw out:=/sdk/xdisplay

• http://www.ros.org/wiki/image_transport#republish

Links:

• http://www.ros.org/wiki/image_transport
• http://www.ros.org/wiki/image_transport#republish
• http://www.ros.org/wiki/image_view/Troubleshooting
• http://www.ros.org/wiki/compressed_image_transport