Interfacing USB webcams in ROS

We can interface with an ordinary webcam or a laptop cam in ROS. Overall, there are no ROS-specific packages we must install to 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. You can also check this by using applications such as Cheese, VLC, and others. A guide for checking whether the webcam is supported on Ubuntu is available at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Webcam.

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

ls /dev/ | grep video    

If you get an output of video0, then this confirms that a USB camera is available for use.

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

sudo apt install ros-noetic-usb-cam  

We can install the latest...