Package Summary

The industrial_extrinsic_cal package

Maintainer: clewis <clewis AT swri DOT org>
Author: Chris Lewis <clewis AT swri DOT org>
License: Apache
Source: git https://github.com/ros-industrial/industrial_calibration.git (branch: hydro)

Experimental

EXPERIMENTAL: This status indicates that this software is experimental code at best. There are known issues and missing functionality. The APIs are completely unstable and likely to change. Use in production systems is not recommended. All code starts at this level. For more information see the ROS-Industrial software status page.

Contents

Overview
Installation
Tutorials
Design

Overview

The industrial_extrinsic_cal package provides a generic tool for calibrating sensors to a known reference frame. It is relevant to anyone using a system in which the relative position(extrinsics) of multiple pieces of equipment must be determined. Common equipment examples include positioning systems(i.e. robots, cartesian gantries), measurement/sensor systems (i.e. camera(s), laser scanner/trackers, radio) and fixturing(accurately produced parts for referencing objects of interest).

The calibration uses Google's Ceres solver to perform bundle adjustment or minimize the reprojection error of the camera to the known points. The Ceres software problem and solver are generic and the cost functions contain the definition of the error to minimize.

Installation

UPDATE 20170922 For ROS indigo, the following ceres installation is now not necessary now that this pull request is merged. Please report if you see any issue regarding this.

The industrial extrinsic calibration package depends on the google Ceres Solver. The steps below walk through a minimal installation of Ceres on Ubuntu 14.04 as required for this package, more detailed instructions or different Ubuntu versions can be found here. NOTE: These instructions download and install dependencies from your home directory. Once installed, these tarballs and directories can be deleted.

Install gflags

cd
wget https://github.com/gflags/gflags/archive/v2.1.2.zip
unzip v2.1.2.zip && rm v2.1.2.zip
cd gflags-2.1.2 && mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON
make
sudo make install

Install glog

cd
wget https://github.com/google/glog/archive/v0.3.4.zip
unzip v0.3.4.zip && rm v0.3.4.zip
cd glog-0.3.4/
./configure --with-gflags=/usr/local/
make
sudo make install

Install Ceres

cd
wget https://github.com/ceres-solver/ceres-solver/archive/1.11.0.zip
unzip 1.11.0.zip && rm 1.11.0.zip
cd ceres-solver-1.11.0
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

Install industrial_extrinisc_cal from source.

Tutorials

Examples can be found in the tutorials.

Design

Detailed design info can be found in this presentation presented at ROSCon 2014.