Interfacing USB webcams in ROS

We can start interfacing with an ordinary webcam or a laptop cam in ROS. Overall, there are no ROS-specific packages to install and use web cameras. If the camera is working in Ubuntu/Linux, it may be supported by the ROS driver too. After plugging in the camera, check whether a /dev/videoX device file has been created, or check with some application such as Cheese, VLC, or similar others. The guide to check whether the webcam is supported on Ubuntu is available at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Webcam.

We can find the video devices present on the system using the following command:

$ ls /dev/ | grep video

If you get an output of video, you can confirm a USB cam is available for use.

After ensuring the webcam support in Ubuntu, we can install a ROS webcam driver called usb_cam using the following command:

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

We can install the latest package of usb_cam from the source code. The driver is available on GitHub, at https://github...