Amazon Kinesis Video Streams WebRTC on ROS 1

Overview

The Kinesis Webrtc ROS package enables ROS image topics to transmit video using AWS Kinesis Video Streams with WebRTC. This repository is the combination of below repositories and fitted to use with ROS noetic & melodic

https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-kinesis-video-streams-webrtc-sdk-c
https://github.com/aws-robotics/kinesisvideo-ros1
https://github.com/aws-robotics/utils-ros1
https://github.com/aws-robotics/kinesisvideo-encoder-common
https://github.com/aws-robotics/utils-common

Building from Source

To build from source you'll need to create a new workspace, clone and checkout the latest release branch of this repository, install all the dependencies, and compile. If you need the latest development features you can clone from the master branch instead of the latest release branch. While we guarantee the release branches are stable, the master should be considered to have an unstable build due to ongoing development.

• Clone the repo

• Install dependencies

    sudo apt-get update && rosdep update
    rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y
  

• Build the packages

    catkin build
  

• Source ROS library Path

Run the application

Setup your environment with your AWS account credentials and AWS region:

• First set the appropriate environment variables so you can connect to KVS. More details can be found at webrtc README.

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID= <AWS account access key>
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY= <AWS account secret key>

• Optionally, set AWS_SESSION_TOKEN if integrating with temporary token

export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=<session token>

• Region is optional, if not being set, then us-west-2 will be used as default region.

export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION= <AWS region>

• Launch the encoder and transmitter

roslaunch h264_video_encoder sample_application.launch
rosrun kinesis_video_webrtc kvsWebrtcClientMaster myChannel /video/encoded

Note: I have only converted kvsWebrtcClientMaster.c to ROS code for now.

Build and run the unit tests

catkin build --cmake-target tests
catkin test

Launch Files

A launch file called h264_video_encoder.launch is included in this package. The launch file uses the following arguments:

Arg Name	Description
node_name	(optional) The name the H264 encoder node should be launched with. If not provided, the node name will default to h264_video_encoder
config_file	(optional) A path to a rosparam config file.

An example launch file called sample_application.launch is included in this project that gives an example of how you can include this node in your project and provide it with arguments.

Usage

Running the node

To launch the H264 encoder node, you can run the following command:

roslaunch h264_video_encoder sample_application.launch

Configuration File and Parameters

An example configuration file called sample_configuration.yaml is provided for running the H264 encoder node on a Raspberry Pi based system. When the parameters are absent in the ROS parameter server, default values are used, thus all parameters are optional. See table below for details.

Parameter Name	Description	Type
queue_size	(optional) The maximum number of incoming and outgoing messages to be queued towards the subscribed and publishing topics.	integer
output_width	(optional) The desired width (in pixels) of each frame in the encoded video output.	integer
output_height	(optional) The desired height (in pixels) of each frame in the encoded video output.	integer
fps_numerator	(optional) The desired frames per second (the numerator portion when expressing FPS as a rational number) for the encoded video output.	integer
fps_denominator	(optional) The desired frames per second (the denominator portion when expressing FPS as a rational number) for the encoded video output.	integer
bitrate	(optional) The desired bitrate (in bits per second) of the encoded video output.	integer

Node Details

Published Topics

Topic Name	Message Type	Description
Configurable (default="video/encoded")	kinesis_video_msgs/KinesisVideoFrame	The node will publish to a topic of a given name. Each message being published contains a chunk of the video stream, usually per video frame.

Subscribed Topics

Topic Name	Message Type	Description
Configurable (default="/raspicam_node/image")	sensor_msgs/Image	The node will subscribe to a topic of a given name. The data is expected to be a stream of images from a source (such as a Raspberry Pi camera).