This week, I focused on obtaining a webcam feed for the exercise. Initially, I encountered a specific error while running sample code to access the webcam feed, where the console displayed the message, “An instance of Gazebo is not running.” To address this issue, I engaged in meticulous discussions with my mentors and arrived at the following solution:

  • I removed all instances related to the GUI file where we were possibly accessing Gazebo. I discovered that we were calculating the real-time factor (RTF), which is typically utilized by Gazebo; however, we weren’t using it in our case. Therefore, I eliminated all references to the real_time_factor or rtf from the GUI file.

Additionally, I encountered an issue with mismatched topics between subscribers and publishers in the launch files and HAL.py files. I corrected these discrepancies to ensure they all referenced the same v4l2_camera_node.

Another potential issue I identified was that the physics rate visualization type was not included in the launch of the gui_server in manager.py. I resolved this by adding an entry for the physics rate visualization alongside the Gazebo rate visualization.