The Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick (NCS) is a tiny fanless deep learning device that you can use to learn AI programming at the edge. NCS is powered by the same low power high performance Movidius™ Vision Processing Unit (VPU) that can be found in millions of smart security cameras, gesture controlled drones, industrial machine vision equipment, and more.
This project is a ROS wrapper for NC API of NCS SDK, providing the following features in the latest release(v0.3.0):

• A ROS service for classifying objects in a static image file
• A ROS publisher for classifying objects in a video stream from a USB camera
• Demo applications to show the capbilities of ROS service and publisher
• Support multiple CNN models

• An x86_64 computer running Ubuntu 16.04
• ROS Kinetic
• Movidius Neural Compute Stick (NCS)
• Movidius Neural Compute (MvNC) SDK
• USB Camera, e.g. Realsense ZR300 camera or standard USB camera

• Install ROS Kinetic Desktop-Full (guide)
• Create a catkin workspace (guide)
• Install NCS SDK (guide)
• Create a symbol link in /opt to the installation path of NCS SDK <ncs-sdk-installation-path>

sudo ln -s <ncs-sdk-installation-path> /opt/NCS

After that, make sure you can find graph data in /opt/NCS/ncapi/networks and image data in /opt/NCS/ncapi/images

• Install ROS package for different cameras as needed. e.g.
  1. Standard USB camera

  sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-usb-cam

  2. Realsense ZR300 camera
     Install Realsense camera package (guide). Refer to Realsense ROS WiKi for more information.

cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/intel/ros_intel_movidius_ncs.git
cd ~/catkin_ws
catkin_make
catkin_make install
source devel/setup.bash

Launch video streaming nodelet. Refer here for more parameter configurations.

roslaunch movidius_ncs_launch ncs_usbcam.launch

Make sure you can get result from the topic of object classification.

rostopic echo /movidius_ncs_nodelet/classified_object

Launch image viewer to show the inference result.

roslaunch movidius_ncs_launch ncs_stream_example.launch camera_topic:="/usb_cam/image_raw"

Launch video streaming nodelet. Refer here for more parameter configurations.

roslaunch movidius_ncs_launch ncs_realsense.launch

Make sure you can get result from the topic of object classification.

rostopic echo /movidius_ncs_nodelet/classified_object

Launch image viewer to show the inference result. You can launch it directly without setting camera_topic, as its default value is /camera/color/image_raw

roslaunch movidius_ncs_launch ncs_stream_example.launch camera_topic:="/camera/color/image_raw"
#or
roslaunch movidius_ncs_launch ncs_stream_example.launch

Launch your preferred camera node.

#launch ROS master
roscore
#launch camera node in another console
rosrun <your-camera-pkg> <your-camera-node>

e.g.

roscore
rosrun usb_cam usb_cam_node

Launch NCS nodelet and assign input_topic with the topic url of your rgb camera.

roslaunch movidius_ncs_launch ncs_nocam.launch input_topic:=<your_rgb_camera_topic>

e.g.

roslaunch movidius_ncs_launch ncs_nocam.launch input_topic:="/usb_cam/image_raw"

Launch image viewer to show the inference result.

roslaunch movidius_ncs_launch ncs_stream_example.launch camera_topic:=<your_rgb_camera_topic>

e.g.

roslaunch movidius_ncs_launch ncs_stream_example.launch camera_topic:="/usb_cam/image_raw"

Launch object classification service. Refer here for more parameter configurations.

roslaunch movidius_ncs_launch ncs_image.launch

Run the example application with an absolute path of an image

rosrun movidius_ncs_example movidius_ncs_example_image <image_path_to_be_inferred>

e.g.

rosrun movidius_ncs_example movidius_ncs_example_image /opt/NCS/ncapi/images/cat.jpg

You can choose different CNN Models for inference through the argument of network_conf_path. e.g.
Using Realsense camera

#one console
roslaunch movidius_ncs_launch ncs_realsense.launch network_conf_path:="/opt/NCS/ncapi/networks/SqueezeNet/"
#another console
roslaunch movidius_ncs_launch ncs_stream_example.launch

Using standard USB camera

#one console
roslaunch movidius_ncs_launch ncs_usbcam.launch network_conf_path:="/opt/NCS/ncapi/networks/AlexNet/"
#another console
roslaunch movidius_ncs_launch ncs_stream_example.launch camera_topic:="/usb_cam/image_raw"

/movidius_ncs_nodelet/classified_object

/movidius_ncs_image/classify_object

• Only absolute path of image file supported in image inference demo
• Only test on Realsense ZR300 camera and Microsoft HD-300 USB camera

• Support multiple NCS devices
• Support more CNN models