berndpfrommer
commented
1 year ago I didn't quite understand this part of your comment: "The flir_spinnaker_ros2 driver outputs drop at about 90%, from 20Hz to 5Hz.". Could you please post a sample of the driver's log to the console?
Without the driver log it's hard to say what's going on but from what you write it feels like this is a ROS2 issue more than a driver issue. A couple of other data points that would be interesting to know:
- Is everything (driver, viewer etc) running on the same host or are you going across the network for any of the subscribers?
- What hardware are you running this on (raspberry pi, laptop, or big fat PC)?
- Could you check the CPU load of driver and subscribers while you experience the frame drops?
- Is the host running out of CPU resources (i.e. all cores busy)?
A warning about ros2 topic hz: it is not an accurate tool for measuring frequency because its code is so inefficient that it may drop data itself. Check CPU load of that process to see that it is not maxing out on CPU. To be fair at 20hz it should not be a problem, but just something to be aware of. The camera driver itself is actually fairly simple. It takes an image from the camera and publishes it. Unless it fails to call to publish(), the problem is in ROS2 land, or the way the driver is using it, i.e. the quality-of-service profile used: https://github.com/berndpfrommer/flir_spinnaker_ros2/blob/63e17e1b793b99ff0fa87d8f5009a3a041f09549/src/camera_driver.cpp#L580 Feel free to experiment with "image_queue_size". You can also try to just use the default profile by commenting out the lines that modify the default profile (following the line linked above). The following suggestion will not help you with viewer issues, but may be interesting for other subscribers in your setup. You can run the the driver as a composable node in the same address space as the consumer. This way you get better performance and bypass the middleware. The stereo launch script gives an example of how to do that: https://github.com/berndpfrommer/flir_spinnaker_ros2/blob/master/launch/stereo_synced.launch.py Lastly, maybe the nuclear option of changing the middleware will make a difference: https://docs.ros.org/en/foxy/How-To-Guides/Working-with-multiple-RMW-implementations.html
Thomas-Merlet
Hi,
I'm running into issues while testing the driver in ROS2.
I'm able to compile and launch the driver without issues, correctly connecting to a USB3 or a GiGE FLIR Blackfly BFLY-U3-23S6C. I'm trying to get the image at 20Hz.
However, I've encountered the following issues:
When launching the driver and having one subscriber (like
rqt_image_view), everything works fine and the image seems to be at the required framerate. However, when launching another subscriber likeros2 topic hz, we can see a significant framerate drop in the image view and the reported frequency is about 5Hz. The flir_spinnaker_ros2 driver outputs drop at about 90%, from 20Hz to 5Hz. . When killing the other subscriber, everything goes back to normal. Note that this issue is not always present, and can sometimes appear during runtime. I've encountered the same problem with USB3 or GiGE cameras.When only launching the driver, everything works fine and the image seems to be at the required framerate. However, when launching multiple other ROS1 and ROS2 nodes, I can see a significant framerate drop in the image view, but the flir_spinnaker_ros2 output indicates no issues even though the image is not smooth. The camera is directly connected to the computer through USB3. Note that I've tried using the following ROS1 driver https://github.com/ros-drivers/flir_camera_driver, and everything's working fine even if multiple nodes are running.
OS: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS ROS: ROS2 Galactic Spinnaker: 3.0.0.118 flir_spinnaker_ros2: 63e17e1
Thanks for your help