How to Output your IMU/GPS Data on your Robot's POV Video Stream

  • By Anonymous
  • /
  • Published Tue, 06/22/2021 - 11:51

Looking to recreate a Heads-Up-Display (HUD) effect on your robot’s POV video stream? Stephen Okay, Roboticist in Residence at Circuit Launch, did just that and provides simple step-by-step details on how you can do the same.

For starters, Stephen’s robot platform goes by the name Tenacity. Tenacity is mostly 3D-printed and was inspired by the Mars rovers Curiosity and Perseverance.

Tenacity Robot

The camera setup that provides the POV visualization is an Orbbec Astra Pro with a structured-light sensor and RGB camera. For this project, Stephen only used the RGB camera. The text displayed in the HUD comes from live ROS topic data, and is generated by a Parker LORD 3DMGX5-GNSS/INS. The onscreen battery data comes from an Arduino-based battery monitor.

To get the information to create the actual HUD effect, all you need to do is subscribe to the ROS /camera/rgb/image_raw camera topic, the ros_mscl node to read the IMU messages, and ros_battery_monitor to read the battery monitor. Since the ROS image format isn’t ideal for us, images from the /camera/rgb/image_raw topic are run through the cv_bridge Python module to convert them from ROS Image format to OpenCV.

To get the useful information, there’s a bit of string processing that needs to be done on the data that comes from the subscribed topics. Once that’s done, send it to a series of OpenCV cv2.putText() commands which puts the topic data right over the image. This can then either be pushed out to another video stream for real-time heads-up POV monitoring of the rover’s activity or saved to an MP4 movie file for further analysis.

Tenacity https://www.microstrain.com/sites/default/files/hud_tool_for_tenacity1.pdfRobot on a hill

You can read Stephen’s original writeup here for more information. Learn more about how our ROS support can accelerate your success by visiting our ROS driver portal.


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