How to use Intel T265 + ROS with BlueROV2?

General Discussion
1

Hello all,

We are trying to implement control of the blueROV based on position/pose provided by visual odometry (VO).

We have had some initial success, where our topside computer recieves the video stream captured by the built-in camera and feeds the stream to an VO ROS node (orbslam3) for position/pose estimation. We then feed the state estimates to a controller node that issues RCoverride commands through MAVROS to the ROV.

To achieve better state estimation, we would like to use an intel T265 camera for VO, instead of the built-in camera. For hardware setup, we plan to:

  1. build a waterproof casing for the intel camera and fix it to bottom of the ROV,
  2. then use penetrator to connect the camera to rasp pi through USB.

The software side is what we are NOT sure about. What we have in mind is to:

  1. install ROS on rasp pi,
  2. install ROS wrapper for intel T265 camera on rasp pi,
  3. connect rasp pi to the topside computer (through Fathom tether?)
  4. run ROS master on topside computer
  5. run intel camera node on rasp pi and send video stream to topside computer as ROS imagemsg.

Do you think these steps are possible? If not, are there other solutions?

Thanks for the help!