Camera Publish and Subscribe

Model Creation

The Gazebo Model Editor can be used to create a simple "car". A tutorial for this model creation can be found at:http://gazebosim.org/tutorials?cat=guided_b&tut=guided_b3

A depth camera model can also be created in gazebo. As ROS and Gazebo are separate projects, with no needed dependencies of each other (unless called for), default gazebo_models do not include ROS plugins. Thus, this creates the need to make a custom camera model, based on Gazebo models and add<plugin>tags to make the camera model publish images to ROS topics. A tutorial and overview can be found at:http://gazebosim.org/tutorials?tut=ros_depth_camera&cat=connect_ros

ROS Image Subscriber

The plugin described above creates a ROS node which will publish the images taken by the camera. In-order to do meaningful analysis of these images, an image subscriber is needed. This image subscriber will take images from the "camera/image" topic, where then further points clouds can be created. A tutorial of an Image Subscriber can be found at:http://wiki.ros.org/image_transport/Tutorials/SubscribingToImages