realsenseai/realsense-ros

What it solves

This project provides a ROS (Robot Operating System) wrapper for Intel RealSense™ cameras. It allows developers to integrate RealSense depth and color cameras into ROS-based robotic systems, enabling the hardware to communicate with ROS nodes, topics, and services for easier data acquisition and robot control.

How it works

The wrapper acts as a bridge between the RealSense SDK 2.0 (librealsense2) and the ROS2 ecosystem. It exposes camera streams (depth, color, infrared) and sensor data as ROS topics, provides services for hardware resets and calibration configuration, and supports ROS2 LifeCycleNodes for explicit state management (e.g., configuring, activating, and deactivating the camera).

Who it’s for

It is designed for robotics engineers and developers building autonomous systems that require depth sensing, 3D perception, or visual SLAM using RealSense hardware within a ROS2 (or legacy ROS1) environment.

Highlights

• Multi-Distro Support: Compatible with various ROS2 distributions including Humble, Iron, Jazzy, and Kilted.
• Lifecycle Node Integration: Supports rclcpp_lifecycle::LifecycleNode for better node management and state transitions.
• Flexible Configuration: Allows runtime modification of sensor parameters, video profiles (width, height, fps), and post-processing filters.
• Namespace Management: Supports custom camera names and namespaces to handle multiple cameras across multiple robots.
• Cross-Platform: Provides installation paths for both Ubuntu and Windows.