voxl-mpa-to-ros node crashes when /uvc topic is echoed (VOXL2, version 1.1)

[Isaac Stephan Remy]

Hey there,

I have a Sentinel drone equipped with a VOXL2 onboard (running Ubuntu 18 + ROS Melodic). I also have a FLIR Lepton 3.5 thermal camera plugged into the VOXL2 via a USB connection. I can RTSP stream the Lepton's camera data from the VOXL2 to QGroundControl on my laptop when I run the voxl-uvc-server (with the proper parameters), but when I run the voxl_mpa_to_ros node and echo or subscribe to the /uvc topic to get the camera data, the ros node crashes with this error:

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::bad_alloc'
what(): std::bad_alloc
[voxl_mpa_to_ros_node-2] process has died [pid 2409, exit code -6, cmd /opt/ros/melodic/lib/voxl_mpa_to_ros/voxl_mpa_to_ros_node __name:=voxl_mpa_to_ros_node __log:=/home/root/.ros/log/5567d258-c2e7-11ee-a3cf-00c0cab38e43/voxl_mpa_to_ros_node-2.log].
log file: /home/root/.ros/log/5567d258-c2e7-11ee-a3cf-00c0cab38e43/voxl_mpa_to_ros_node-2*.log

[Zachary Lowell 0]

Hi @Isaac-Stephan-Remy that tends to happen when the conversion from the frame in MPA to the ros1 or 2 image is not allocated the proper amount of size. I will do some testing with a FLIR thermal camera over UVC and get back with a fix for a PR - you will need to most likely build from source for ros1.

Also I do recommend swapping over to ROS2 FOXY on the voxl2 as it is more supported and ROS1 is at EOL.

Zach

[Isaac Stephan Remy]

Hi @Zachary-Lowell-0,
Thanks for the support! Will the PR be available over GitHub? I will look into ROS2 in the meantime.

[Zachary Lowell 0]

Yes it will be available on the gitlab under a new branch most likely by EOD tomorrow. I wll post the branch that you can build from source - once approved it iwll be merged into the next stable release, etc.

[Zachary Lowell 0]

@Isaac-Stephan-Remy please pull down the most recent iteration of https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/utilities/voxl-mpa-to-ros2/-/tree/dev and build within the qrb5165 docker image and deploy the deb. This will allow you to convert UVC 422/UYVY images from the MPA to ros2. In the meantime I am working on the fix for ros1 as well.

Zach