ROS interface 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 low-level driver for the VI-Sensor 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]

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}
}

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

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

Make sure that you installed all necessary ROS packages

sudo apt-get install libeigen3-dev libopencv-dev libboost-dev ros-indigo-cmake-modules

Adjust the packet name to your ros version.

Build the package using catkin_make

catkin_make