RTP Video Receiver & ROS Publisher Node

Overview

The RTP Receiver is a ROS1 Noetic package designed to receive a ffmpeg stream and publish it to the ROS1 Noetic environment.

It receives an H.264 encoded RTP/UDP video stream using a GStreamer pipeline and converts the incoming frames into standard ROS sensor_msgs/Image messages. The package supports streaming from multiple cameras simultaneously.

Works perfectly with our rtp sender package

Requirements

Install the required ROS packages on your operator station:

sudo apt install ros-noetic-cv-bridge ros-noetic-image-transport ros-noetic-rqt-image-view

Make sure the GStreamer 1.0 libraries and Python bindings are installed:

sudo apt install python3-gst-1.0 gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly

Installation

Clone the repository into your Catkin workspace:

cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone git@github.com:CJT-Robotics/rtp_receiver.git

Build the workspace:

cd ~/catkin_ws
catkin_make

Source your workspace:

sudo chmod +x src/rtp_receiver/scripts/rtp_to_ros.py
source devel/setup.bash

Usage

Run FFmpeg to capture your camera device (e.g. /dev/video0), compress it using H.264 with zero-latency tuning, and send it.

Launch the receiver:

roslaunch rtp_receiver test.launch

Configuration

Multi-Camera Setup

The package is designed to scale. You can configure multiple cameras by editing the test.launch file and assigning unique UDP ports and camera_id parameters.

Parameters

Parameter	Default	Description
port	5000	UDP port matching the incoming RTP stream from FFmpeg
camera_id	camera_0	Suffix for the published topic

Published Topics

/camera/image_raw/<camera_id>

Type: sensor_msgs/Image

Troubleshooting