motivation

We slowly release into snark library parts of the large code base created over years in ACFR, Australian Centre for Field Robotics at Sydney University. snark contains the stuff that may be missing in other robotics and math libraries like opencv, Eigen, PCL, etc: algorithms, tools, sensor and actuator adaptors, etc.

why snark⸮

snark is an unseen creature that can move on the land and in the water - that's what we work on in ACFR, too
like comma used as a name for our other library, snark is a punctuation mark: ⸮

library overview

actuators: actuator adaptors
quickset: quickset pantilt control
graphics: classes and utilities for editing and viewing 3d data, both realtime streaming and offline; requires qt4 and qt3d
imaging: classes and utilities for realtime and offline image processing; requires opencv, tbb
math: generic utilities and algorithms
point_cloud: 3d point cloud algorithms; requires eigen3
sensors: adaptors for lidars, cameras, etc
dc1394: firewire camera adaptor and streaming application; requires libdc1394, opencv, tbb
gige: prosilica gige camera adaptor and streaming application; requires proprietary prosilica libAVI, opencv, tbb
sick: ldmrs sick lidar adaptors and streaming application; requires eigen3
velodyne: velodyne lidar adaptors and streaming application; requires eigen3, pcap
tbb: wrappers for intel tbb
timing: time utilities
visiting: visiting traits (for more info on visiting see https://github.com/acfr/comma/wiki/visiting)

applications overview

quickset-pantilt-control: control quickset pantilt
quickset-pantilt-from-console: convert console key presses to pantilt control commands
view-points: view multiple point cloud streams in realtime and offline
label-points: manually label multiple point clouds
cv-cat: transform, filter, and view cv::Mat-style images on the fly
image-accumulate: accumulate cv::Mat-style images from the streams of numbers
math points-frame: transform a stream of 3d points into a different coordinate frame (e.g. georeferencing)
math math-deg2rad: convert degrees to radians
math math-rad2deg: convert radians to degrees
math math-rotation-convert: convert between roll-pitch-yaw and quaternions
points-to-voxels: take a stream of points, output voxel indices and centroids
points-to-voxel-indices: take a stream of points, decorate with voxel indices
fire-cat: stream image data from a firewire camera
gige-cat: stream image data from a prosilica gige camera
sick-ldmrs-stream: configure and stream lidar data from sick ldmrs lidar
sick-ldmrs-to-csv: convert a stream sick ldmrs lidar data to 3d points in csv format
velodyne-to-csv: convert velodyne data stream to 3d points in csv format
velodyne-thin: thin down and compress velodyne data on the fly

Installation

Linux

Let's call this directory 'source_dir' (where this INSTALL file is). Before starting, create another directory which we will call 'build_dir'.

Do:

cd build_dir
cmake source_dir
make install

The "make install" step may require administrator privileges.

You can adjust the installation destination (the "prefix") by passing the -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=myprefix option to cmake