refills_marker_generator

A collection of nodes to generate QRmarkers used in the REFILLS project.

Printable markers with Chilitags inside

This package contains a script that allows you to create printable markers with Chilitags markers inside. The resulting markers will look like this:

Rationale

The printable markers also contain some human-readable information that indicate:

• which number the Chilitag marker encodes
• on which side of a shelf this marker should be attached

To ease visual inspection, the human-readable information is printed in different colors. As a result, it should be trivial to infer --even from a distance-- whether a set of markers is correctly placed on a shelf. Also, the colors have been chosen to be distinguishable by person with colorblindness.

Installation

Installation has been tested for Ubuntu 16.04 using ROS Kinetic:

source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash          # start using ROS kinetic
mkdir -p ~/my_ws/src                        # create directory for workspace
cd ~/my_ws                                  # go to workspace directory
catkin init                                 # init workspace
cd src                                      # go to source directory of workspace
wstool init                                 # init rosinstall
wstool merge https://raw.githubusercontent.com/refills-project/refills_marker_generator/master/rosinstall/catkin.rosinstall
                                            # update rosinstall file
wstool update                               # pull source repositories
rosdep install --ignore-src --from-paths .  # install dependencies available through apt
cd ..                                       # go to workspace directory
catkin build                                # build packages
source ~/my_ws/devel/setup.bash             # source new overlay

Usage

To create a single marker file encoding <NUM> call:

$ rosrun refills_marker_generator gen_chilitags <NUM>

To create several marker files, starting with <START> and ending with <END>, call:

$ rosrun refills_marker_generator gen_chilitags <START> <END>

Note, all generated markers (and generated intermediate files) will be placed inside your current directory.

The script comes with has a short help output:

$ rosrun refills_marker_generator gen_chilitags -h
usage: gen_chilitags [-h] first [last]

Create some augmented 'Chilitag' QR markers for printing.

positional arguments:
  first       The first number to encode. It has to be between 1 and 1023.
  last        The last number to encode. It has to be between 1 and 1023,and
              it has to be also greater than 'first'.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit