libvisensor

Sensor driver library to the Visual-Inertial Sensor developed by the Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL), ETH Zurich and Skybotix AG. This sensor provides fully time-synchronized and factory calibrated IMU- and stereo-camera datastreams. A detailed spec sheet of the sensor can be found here. The ROS frontend of the VI-Sensor library can be found here.

A detailed description on how the sensor can be used in ROS is found in the corresponding ROS-Wiki.

Authors

• Michael Burri [michael.burri at mavt.ethz.ch]
• Janosch Nikolic [janosch.nikolic at mavt.ethz.ch]
• Jörn Rehder [joern.rehder at mavt.ethz.ch]
• Stefan Leutenegger [s.leutenegger at imperial.ac.uk]
• Thomas Schneider [schneith at ethz.ch]
• Pascal Gohl [pascal.gohl at mavt.ethz.ch]
• Sammy Omari [sammy.omari at mavt.ethz.ch]

Reference

Please cite our paper when using the VI-Sensor in an academic publication.

1. Nikolic, J., Rehder, J., Burri, M., Gohl, P., Leutenegger, S., Furgale, P. T., & Siegwart, R. (2014). A Synchronized Visual-Inertial Sensor System with FPGA Pre-Processing for Accurate Real-Time SLAM. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Hongkong, China. ( [video] (http://youtu.be/jcjB_Pflu5A) )

as bibtex:

@inproceedings{nikolic2014synchronized,
  title={A synchronized visual-inertial sensor system with FPGA pre-processing for accurate real-time SLAM},
  author={Nikolic, Janosch and Rehder, Joern and Burri, Michael and Gohl, Pascal and Leutenegger, Stefan and Furgale, Paul T and Siegwart, Roland},
  booktitle={Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2014 IEEE International Conference on},
  pages={431--437},
  year={2014},
  organization={IEEE}
}

Installation Instructions ROS

Check out the sensor library and this node to your catkin workspace:

cd your_catkin_workspace
git clone https://github.com/ethz-asl/libvisensor.git

Make sure that you installed all necessary Ubuntu packages

sudo apt-get install libeigen3-dev libboost-dev

Build the package using catkin_make

catkin_make

Installation Instructions Stand-alone (No ROS)

Check out the sensor library

git clone https://github.com/ethz-asl/libvisensor.git

Make sure that you installed all necessary Ubuntu packages

sudo apt-get install libeigen3-dev libboost-dev

Build the package and install it system-wide.

cd libvisensor
./install_libvisensor

In case you don't want to install the library system-wide, you can also simply build it using

cd libvisensor
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

In this case, you have to ensure that your applications can find the library files and headers.

To see sample (stand-alone) projects, please refer to https://github.com/skybotix/visensor_sample_applications

This repo contains a few sample standalone applications for the VI-Sensor

• vi_sensor_interface: A very basic interface to the VI-Sensor. Receives images and IMU messages and displays it using openCV.
• vi_sensor_stereo_block_matcher: Applies rectification to Vi-Sensor images and subsequently computes the disparity image using standard openCV block matcher. Intrinsic & extrinsic calibration parameters for rectification are downloaded from VI-Sensor.