cross-posted from willowgarage.com
In a little less than three months, Yiping Liu from Ohio State University made a significant update to the camera pose stack by making it possible to calibrate cameras that are connected by moving joints, and storing the result to a URDF file. The camera pose stack captures both the relative poses of the cameras and the state of the joints between the cameras. The optimizer can run over multiple camera poses and multiple joint states.
The goal was to calibrate multiple RGB cameras, such as the Microsoft Kinect, Prosilicas, webcams, and other mounted cameras, on a robot, relative to other cameras. The results are automatically added to the URDF of the robot.
Yiping set up a PR2 with a Kinect camera mounted on its head to demonstrate the calibration between the onboard camera and statically mounted cameras. The PR2 was directed close enough to the statically mounted camera and store the captured checker board pattern. The internal optimizer can produce better results with accumulated measurements.
In the other use case, the PR2 looks at itself in a previously mapped space. Yiping built a simple GUI in cameraposetoolkits for choosing the camera to calibrate. The PR2 moved in front of the selected camera and calibration was performed. The package publishes all calibrated camera frames to TF in realtime. You can watch Yiping's camera calibration tests on his video.
To use the camera pose toolkits in your work and to find the latest update, check the ROS.org site. Yiping also created tutorials with helpful information about calibrating multiple cameras.
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