The different camera drivers available and the different ways to use cameras on ROS are explained in the following sections. In essence, they distinguish between FireWire and USB cameras.

The first few steps that we must perform are connecting the camera to the computer, running the driver, and seeing the images it acquires in ROS. Before we get into ROS, it is always a good idea to use external tools to check that the camera is actually recognized by our system, which, in our case, is an Ubuntu distribution. We will start with FireWire cameras since they are better supported in ROS, and later we will look at USB cameras.