Welcome to the second post on setting up a Jetson AGX Orin for robotics development! Today, we will focus on setting up all the required drivers and dependencies for Inivation’s event camera, including the ROS installation and ROS packages. The structure for this post goes as follows:

• 1. Prerequisites
• 2. Setting up the camera driver
• 3. Setting up ROS Noetic
  • 3.1 Installing bootstrap dependencies
  • 3.2 Initializing rosdep
  • 3.3 Installation
    • 3.3.1 Create a catkin workspace
    • 3.3.2 Resolve dependencies
    • 3.3.3 Building the catkin workspace
• 4. Setting up the ROS camera driver
  • 4.1 Some extra dependencies
  • 4.2 Setting up the workspace
  • 4.3 Cloning and building dv-ros

Once you’ve gone through all these steps, you will be ready to run the iniVation’s event camera on your board.

Reminder: For this project I will be using the JETSON AGX ORIN DEVELOPER KIT. Some things to take into account about this board:

• It is an ARM64 architecture.
• It has Ubuntu 20.04 installed
• It comes with the Nvidia Jetpack 5.1.2

1. Prerequisites

sudo apt install liblz4-dev libzstd-dev libgoogle-perftools-dev ninja-build python3-pip

• Compilers
  • GCC and G++ compiler should be version 10.0 as required by the inivation driver. Check which version you have set up by default as:

      gcc -v
      g++ -v
    

    For me it is:

      gcc (Ubuntu 9.4.0-1ubuntu1~20.04.2) 9.4.0
      g++ (Ubuntu 9.4.0-1ubuntu1~20.04.2) 9.4.0
    

    Therefore, we first need to install gcc and g++ 10.0:

      sudo apt install gcc-10 g++-10
    

    And then set it as the default compiler:

      sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-10 10
      sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-10 10
    

• Boost library >= 1.76. Check which version you have installed as:

    apt list --installed | grep libboost
  

  If your version is less than 1.76, you can install a newer version as follows:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mhier/libboost-latest
    sudo apt update
  

  And then (e.g. for version 1.83):

    sudo apt install libboost1.83-all-dev
  

  However, before deciding which version to install, I recommend you to read section 3. Setting up ROS Noetic in this post.

• OpenSSL

    sudo apt install libssl-dev
  

• Eigen3. In Ubuntu 20.4, the eigen3 version installed by the apt is 3.3.4. To install the required version 3.4, follow the instructions depicted here.

• fmt. Similarly, the apt manager installs an older version of the fmt library. To install the latest release:

    wget https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt/releases/download/10.1.0/fmt-10.1.0.zip
    unzip fmt-10.1.0.zip
    cd fmt-10.1.0
    mkdir build && cd build
    cmake -DCMAKE_POSITION_INDEPENDENT_CODE=ON ..
    make
    sudo make install
  

• OpenCV additional modules. The default installation is missing some OpenCV modules. You can follow the instructions from my previous post to install all required modules.

• (Optional) SDL, with installation instructions here.
• (Optional) Aravis, with installation instructions here.
  • In Ubuntu 20.04, the meson version installed by the apt is too old for this build. Therefore, you need to install it manually:

      git clone https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson
      cd meson
      python3 -m pip install -I meson
      python3 -m pip install ninja
    

  • When running ninja install for installing Aravis, you might get the error ModuleNotFoundError: no module named 'mesonbuild'. This is due to the installation path for the meson library. You can fix it by adding it to the PYTHONPATH:

      export PYTHONPATH=$(python3 -m site --user-site)
    

    and then, running the ninja install command as:

      sudo -E ninja install
    

2. Setting up the camera driver

Inivation provides instructions for the Ubuntu packages (for Ubuntu 20.04 in my case) on their official website. However, the apt installation did not work: The Orin comes with CuDNN 8.0, which requires OpenCV >= 4.4, and the apt dv-runtime-dev installation is looking for OpenCV 4.2. Therefore, we’ve installed the libraries from source. For that, we must download the DV repos in our favorite folder (for me, $HOME/dev). Let’s go one by one:

• libcaer:

    git clone https://gitlab.com/inivation/dv/libcaer
    cd libcaer
    cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr .
    make
    sudo make install
  

• dv-processing:

    git clone https://gitlab.com/inivation/dv/dv-processing
    cd dv-processing
    cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr .
    make
    sudo make install
  

• dv-runtime:

    git clone https://gitlab.com/inivation/dv/dv-runtime
    cd dv-runtime
    cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr DVR_ENABLE_PROFILER=ON .
    make
    sudo make install
  

3. Setting up ROS Noetic

Fighting demons or being the demon? Yes, we’re setting up ROS1 here. It is still the primary OS for event cameras. This section needs a bit of storytelling: This is not my first iteration of installing all these libraries in the Orin. In a previous iteration, I installed all the libraries (OpenCV, ROS, etc.), and the installation of the iniVation drivers would fail. I blamed OpenCV for these issues (don’t look at me like that, OpenCV; we’ve been through this before). But I think now that the problems actually came from ROS and its dependencies!

It turns out that ROS Noetic uses a version of Boost older than the one that the inivation driver needs. Because I installed the iniVation driver first, the compilation went down smoothly. However, now I can’t install ROS Noetic with apt. We will need to install it from source. Damm! Seems like we’re being the demons and fighting demons after all.

Note for future self: maybe if instead of Boost 1.83 I would have installed the minimum required version by inivation, that is, Boost 1.76, then maybe sudo apt install ros-noetic-desktop-full would have worked? It does not seem likely because I tried running that command with aptitude, and the only option it gave for Boost was 1.71. But this could be something worth a try.

Now, I will put here the instructions for installing ROS Noetic from source. They’re slightly modified with respect to the original instructions. For convenience, I will follow the same structure.

3.1 Installing bootstrap dependencies

sudo apt-get install python3-rosdep python3-rosinstall-generator python3-vcstools python3-vcstool build-essential

3.2 Initializing rosdep

sudo rosdep init
rosdep update

3.3 Installation

3.3.1 Create a catkin workspace

I will call my workspace ros_noetic_ws. You can give it whichever name you want.

mkdir ~/ros_noetic_ws
cd ~/ros_noetic_ws

Download all the ROS packages into the source:

rosinstall_generator desktop --rosdistro noetic --deps --tar > noetic-desktop.rosinstall
mkdir ./src
vcs import --input noetic-desktop.rosinstall ./src

3.3.2 Resolve dependencies

I’m putting this command here, but it gave me an error. It gave me the same error as for the sudo apt install ros-noetic-desktop-full: unresolved dependencies. Basically, I had to manually install all the dependencies myself. A bit annoying but not too bad.

 rosdep install --from-paths ./src --ignore-packages-from-source --rosdistro noetic -y

The dependencies I had to install are:

sudo apt install -y libassimp-dev liburdfdom-dev liblog4cxx-dev libgpgme-dev libbz2-dev libgtest-dev sip-dev pyqt5-dev python-sip-dev pyqt5-dev-tools python3-pyqt5 libtinyxml2-dev libtinyxml-dev libpoco-dev  libconsole-bridge-dev python3-empy

Another dependency available in apt but that needs to be installed manually due to the unresolved dependencies with Boost is libogre, with building instructions indicated here.

• pugixml (required by Ogre):

    git clone https://github.com/zeux/pugixml.git
    cd pugixml
    mkdir build && cd build
    cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr DVR_ENABLE_PROFILER=ON ..
    make && sudo make install
  

• Ogre v1.12.2, as it is the latest version supported by ROS Noetic. First, install the dependencies:

    sudo apt install libcppunit-dev
  

  Then proceed to the installation itself:

    git clone https://github.com/OGRECave/ogre.git
    cd ogre
    git checkout v1.12.2  # Replace with the version you need
  

  NOTE: If you get compilation issues with Ogre, you can proceed without installing the ROS packages that depend on it. Those are rviz and all the packages depending on rviz. This means that you will have to run the catkin_make_isolated command with the flag: --ignore-pkg rviz rviz_plugin_tutorials rviz_python_tutorial librviz_tutorial rqt_rviz

• image_common ROS stack: for some reason, the image_common stack downloaded by the previous steps does not include all the packages that we will need. You can manually download it into the workspace as:

    cd ~/ros_noetic_ws/src
    git rm -rf image_common && git clone https://github.com/ros-perception/image_common.git
    cd image_common && git checkout noetic-devel
  

3.3.3 Building the catkin workspace

This command is slightly different from the original instructions. The difference lies in the flag -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS=-DBOOST_TIMER_ENABLE_DEPRECATED. Without it, the compilation gives an error due to a deprecated header:

/usr/include/boost/progress.hpp:23:3: error: #error This header is deprecated and will be removed. (You can define BOOST_TIMER_ENABLE_DEPRECATED to suppress this error.)

What the flag does is ignore the error and resume the compilation:

./src/catkin/bin/catkin_make_isolated --install -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python3 -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS=-DBOOST_TIMER_ENABLE_DEPRECATED

Now, you should have successfully compiled all the ROS Noetic packages! You can source the workspace by adding the following line to the end of the ~/.bashrc:

source ~/ros_catkin_ws/install_isolated/setup.bash

4. Setting up the ROS camera driver

We finally have all the external libraries ready to run the ROS driver for the iniVation camera. Let’s install it!

4.1 Some extra dependencies

After following the previous instructions, you might still miss the following dependencies:

pip3 install defusedxml netifaces

4.2 Setting up the workspace

Let’s set up a separate workspace for ROS development. Doing so is as simple as creating a folder containing a source workspace and building it with catkin:

mkdir -p catkin_ws/src 
cd catkin_ws
catkin build

4.3 Cloning and building dv-ros

The ROS package that contains the code to run the iniVation camera is dv-ros. The original code is in this repo. However, we will use this fork of the repo. This is because, as of today (Jan 24), the original code is not compatible with fmt10 (although that’s not the case for the camera drivers).

cd catkin_ws/src 
git clone https://github.com/olayasturias/dv-ros
cd ..
catkin build --cmake-args -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=gcc-10 -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=g++-10

If the compilation is successful, test that the driver is working:

source devel/setup.bash
roslaunch dv_ros_visualization event_visualization.launch