A guide for setting up the VRPN client in ROS for receiving data from the Optitrack. This repo contains the essential ROS packages to receive the data from OptiTrack Motive through VRPN protocol. For the OptiTrack Server setup, please refer to OptiTrack Motive VRPN Streaming Setup and Configure Guidance.
Please note that this setup has been tested only on private networks, such as those typically used in homes, and not on institutional networks like Eduroam or UniWireless, which have distinct login credentials, firewall settings, and administrative controls. If you encounter issues, it's recommended to first connect through a private network.
Please note that this ROS branch has been tested on noetic, moelodic and kinetic ROS distributions on both x86 and ARM CPU (Nvidia Xavier AGX and DJI Manifold 2G).
The Virtual-Reality Peripheral Network (VRPN) is a set of classes within a library and a set of servers that are designed to implement a network-transparent interface between application programs and the set of physical devices (tracker, etc.) used in a virtual-reality (VR) system. In this repo, we'll only focus on the Optitrack device.
This repo contains the following submodules which are comprehensive to read the data from OptiTrack.
In the src folder in your workspace run the following command:
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/Murphy41/VRPN-OptiTrack-ros.git
Pleaes note that this repo contains submodules and you need to use --recurse-submodules to clone them all.
Then, navigate back to the workspace root path to build it. This step is similar to all other ros packages. In this step, a known bug that a file is missing will interrupt the catkin_make process. To resolve it, you can do catkin_make twice, as the first make process could generate the missing file automatically. However, to avoid this doggy process, it is suggested to use catkin build rather than catkin_make, and this more intellegent catkin tool could handle the build priority in the process. To install catkin build or other catkin tools, please check their tutorials.
A sample launch file is given in VRPN-OptiTrack-ros/vrpn_client_ros/launch folder. As shown in the image, the rosparam in it can be configured based on your needs. In the common case, to run this sample, just check the server ip address and port in the launch file. You can either change the default ip in the launch file directly or state it when use roslaunch (as shown in the following section).
To test the sample launch file, simply use the following code, and replace the following ip address with the ip address of your OptiTrack server.
source devel/setup.bash
roslaunch vrpn_client_ros sample.launch server:=128.130.39.61 & rosrun rviz rviz
The running screenshot will be put here later.
The vrpn_client_ros noetic version is forked from usrl-uofsc/vrpn_client_ros which is developed based on ros-drivers/vrpn_client_ros