Software Requirements

Supported OS

• The driver currently officially supports Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04. We are also using the VI Sensor on Mac OSX 10.7 machines (both using ROS and stand-alone). However, officially we are only providing support for Ubuntu machines.

• If you want to use the sensor in Windows, the users are encouraged to use a Virtual Machine. Refer to VM Support section below for more details.

• It is noted that the host driver is open source and it should be fairly easy to compile the driver on Windows systems as it only uses a set of standard libraries such as boost.

VM Support

You should be able to access the sensor inside a virtual machine. As a default configuration, VMs usually use a NAT network configuration, which blocks the sensor datastream. Instead, we have to set the network configuration of the Gigabit Ethernet adapter to "bridged". Using this setting, the VM will have direct access to the adapter and subsequently to the sensor. If you connect your sensor directly to your PC, the network card inside your VM should have the IP 10.0.0.5 if everything is configured correctly. We have tested this functionality under VirtualBox 4.3 and VMWare Workstation 10.

Supported ROS versions

• The sensor has been extensively tested under ROS Hydro and ROS Indigo. Older version most likely work as well, even though we have not tested it.

Required third party libraries

• The ROS-interface compiles with the standard boost versions of Ubuntu 12.04, 13.04, 13.10 and 14.04.