26-Oct-2016

pylon Camera Software Suite and Basler Cameras in Robotics Applications

The market for robotics applications using vision technology is growing constantly. The cameras are especially beneficial to applications with industrial robots. The ROS – Robot Operating System – open source project has come to serve as a de facto standard for non-industrial robotics software. The ROS community is now working on bringing the software into compliance with industry and its robotics applications.

An example of such an industrial robot is TORU, a mobile picking robot from Munich-based company Magazino , which uses the Basler ace camera as its "seeing eye." To allow Basler cameras to work within the ROS framework, Magazino developed its own proprietary "pylon_camera" ROS package (ROS driver for Basler cameras) , and has now released it together with Basler. It is available for free download under a BSD license at GitHub .

Frank Karstens, whose work as a Product Manager at Basler includes the pylon Camera Software Suite, sees many benefits to the package: "Thanks to the pylon driver for ROS, it's quite easy to use a large number of Basler cameras for ROS-based robotics applications. The free ROS is known for its enormous library of functions, which makes it quicker and easier for our customers to develop robotics software."

Our Success Story "Goods Logistics for Industry 4.0 Using the TORU Picking-Robot and Basler ace Camera" provides more details on how TORU the robot uses the Basler ace camera and its pylon ROS package to master tricky logistics tasks.