Set up the Vision Kit

Connect the camera to Skynode

Connect the camera to one of the USB ports on Skynode using the provided cable. Attach Skynode to your development PC and power it up as shown in: "Connecting to a device".

Software requirements

The Vision Kit requires that the video2ros app and app-base-v2 are installed on Skynode. These can be downloaded from Auterion Suite.

In AuterionOS versions older than v3.5.6, video2ros is pre-installed.

Verify the presence and status of these two apps on the Apps page of the Skynode Web UI on http://10.41.1.1/apps, as shown below.

The Apps page in the Skynode Web UI, showing the app-base-v2 app and video2ros service.

The video2ros service

This service acquires raw video frames from the camera and makes them available to apps utilising the Auterion SDK Camera API (from v1.2.0). Additionally, it publishes these frames on the /camera/image_raw ROS 2 topic. This topic will be available within any other app or service running on the same device. Configure the video2ros settings according to the table below. To edit the settings, click the gear icon for the video2ros service in the Skynode Web UI and select Settings. Note that different settings are required, depending on the version of video2ros.

video2ros v1.2.0 and newer

Setting	Value
Frame rate	15
Width	1280
Height	720
Device	/dev/videoCV
Input Format	UYVY
Output Format	yuv422
Brightness	0
Contrast	9
Gamma	220
Saturation	16
Sharpness	16
Use Custom Auto Exposure	false

Older than v1.2.0

Setting	Value
Frame rate	15
Width	1280
Height	720
Format	YUV422
Device	/dev/videoCV

Alternative image resolutions

The Vision Kit camera supports three resolutions, each with its own maximum frame rate. To use a different resolution, alter the video2ros settings to match one of the combinations below.

Width	Height	Frame Rate
1280	720	15
1920	1080	8
1920	1200	6

Camera calibration

The video2ros service provides an interface for specifying the intrinsic calibration parameters of the camera, if needed.

Please refer to the Camera Calibration documentation for more details.

Validate your setup

To verify that the image topic is being published, you can use the ROS 2 CLI commands within an app or service running on your device. For example, one can check the ROS 2 topic list directly from the video2ros service by executing the commands shown below:

# SSH into Skynode
pc> ssh root@10.41.1.1

# Open a shell in the video2ros service's Docker container
host> docker exec -ti com.auterion.video2ros.video2ros /bin/bash

# Source ROS 2 and list the available topics
video2ros> source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash
video2ros> ros2 topic list

Go to the next page to install and run an example app making use of the Vision Kit.