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RealSense & indoor navigation

Intel RealSense depth and tracking cameras drive both the vision depth features and GPS-denied (indoor) flight. This page installs librealsense and realsense-ros; the indoor VSLAM pipeline builds on top of them.

Install

Builds librealsense from source and installs realsense-ros. The interactive menu offers custom steps, CUDA auto-detection, and verification.

make realsense

Per-distro realsense-ros / librealsense versions are auto-selected from scripts/lib/config.sh; see COMPATIBILITY.md.

CUDA

On NVIDIA GPUs librealsense builds with CUDA automatically (detected via nvcc). Disable it with REALSENSE_CUDA=false make realsense.

T265 tracking camera (discontinued)

The T265 needs the last supporting librealsense / realsense-ros versions, on Humble only:

LIBREALSENSE_VERSION=v2.53.1 REALSENSE_ROS_TAG=4.51.1 make realsense

That source build also provides matching pyrealsense2 for T265 direct mode. The pip extra nectar-sdk[realsense] (PyPI pyrealsense2 ≥2.55) is for D4xx direct mode only — see Cameras.

Indoor navigation

Indoor (GPS-denied) navigation is built into the SDK's Localization module: a RealSense feeds Isaac ROS Visual SLAM on a Jetson, which feeds pose to the FCU over MAVROS or direct MAVLink.

The Isaac producer runs in its own container (make isaac-run). See the Docker guide for the container and the Localization module for the full pipeline.