NDI Optical Tracking Systems ROS 2 Driver

Disclaimer: This is a community-level repository and is not associated with NDI in any way.

This repository offers a ros2_control driver for Northern Digital Inc. (NDI) manufactured optical tracking systems. This driver is a streamlined and updated version of ICube-Robotics/ndisys_ros2. A comparison of this driver and ICube-Robotics' driver is shown below.

Feature	This driver	ICube-Robotics' driver
Compatible ROS2 distro	Jazzy (targets on Ubuntu 24.04)	Humble (targets on Ubuntu 22.04)
Data structure of trackers' pose	Uses the pose_broadcaster to publish trackers' pose in a standard ROS 2 PoseStamped format	Implements a rigid pose broadcaster to publish trackers' pose in a self-defined format
Broadcast tracking data to ROS 2 TF tree	Supported via pose_broadcaster	Supported via self-implemented broadcaster
Shipped with NDI Combined API (C++)	Yes (v1.9.7)	Yes

Compatible devices

NDI optical tracking systems.

System requirements

ROS2 Jazzy on Linux (this driver is developed and tested on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS).

Packages in this repository

• ndi_bringup: This package provides an example to bring up the driver for a NDI polaris vega system. Users may use this package as an reference to write their own bringup package for their application.
• ndi_description: This package contains the .rom file and ros2_control macros for describing the NDI optical tracking systems.
• ndi_hardware: This package contains the ros2_control hardware interface for NDI optical tracking systems. This package is built upon NDI's Combined API (C++) v1.9.7, which is shipped with this package at ndi_hardware/external.

Getting started

1. Clone this repository in your ros2 workspace. Taking ~/ndi_ros2_ws as an example:

   mkdir -p ~/ndi_ros2_ws/src
   cd ~/ndi_ros2_ws/src
   git clone https://github.com/zixingjiang/ndi_ros2_driver.git

2. Install dependencies.

   cd ~/ndi_ros2_ws
   rosdep update --rosdistro=$ROS_DISTRO
   sudo apt update
   rosdep install --from-paths ./ -i -y --rosdistro ${ROS_DISTRO}

3. Build and source the workspace.

   colcon build 
   source install/setup.bash

4. Connect to NDI optical tracking system and bringup the driver. Connect the NDI system with your PC through Ethernet. The ndi_bringup package provides an example launch file to start a NDI polaris vega system with two trackers loaded (tracker_1: 8700339.rom; tracker_2: 8700340.rom):

   # Fill in your NDI system IP address in the following command
   ros2 launch ndi_bringup polaris_vega.launch.py \ 
     ip:=<your_ndi_ip> \
     gui:=true

   By setting gui:=true you can start a Rviz visualization of the tracking data.

   

5. Access the data. After starting the driver, you can access the tracking data through any of the following means: ros2_control state interface, ROS 2 topics, or TF. Note that the ndi_bringup package runs the ros2_control stack under the ndi namespace by default.

Use this driver in your own project

Write your own bringup package

If you want to use this driver in your own project, it is recommended to take ndi_bringup as an example and write your own bringup package. You may find this guide helpful.

Hand-eye calibration

If you want to use NDI devices with robots, you may need to do hand-eye calibration. Although this driver does not provide hand-eye calibration functionalities, there is a list of recommended hand-eye calibration packages that you can use with this driver:

• easy_handeye2: official ROS 2 port of the popular hand-eye calibration package easy_handeye.
• minimal_handeye_ros2: my own hand-eye calibration package that is lightweight and easy to use.

Acknowledgement

This driver is written with reference to ICube-Robotics/ndisys_ros2.

License

This repository is released under the Apache 2.0 license.