ROS 2 Tutorials and Examples

This package contains examples and tutorials for effectively using ZED cameras within the ROS 2 framework.

More information

Getting started

• First, be sure to have installed the main ROS 2 package to integrate the ZED cameras in the ROS 2 framework: zed-ros2-wrapper
• Install the Tutorials package
• Read the online documentation for More information

Prerequisites

• A supported ROS 2 distribution (see Supported ROS 2 distributions below):
  • Humble Hawksbill on Ubuntu 22.04 - LTS [EOL May 2027]
  • Jazzy Jalisco on Ubuntu 24.04 - LTS [EOL May 2029]
  • Lyrical on Ubuntu 26.04 - LTS
  • Foxy Fitzroy on Ubuntu 20.04 - backward compatibility only [EOL reached]
  • Rolling Ridley - for developers

Supported ROS 2 distributions

• ✅ All the current LTS distributions are officially supported: ROS 2 Humble Hawksbill (Ubuntu 22.04), Jazzy Jalisco (Ubuntu 24.04), and Lyrical (Ubuntu 26.04).
• ⚠️ Foxy Fitzroy (Ubuntu 20.04) is still supported for backward compatibility, with limitations when newer packages are not available for it (Foxy reached its End Of Life).
• 🛠️ Rolling Ridley is supported for developers, but we cannot always guarantee that breaking changes introduced in Rolling are supported immediately.
• ❔ Non-LTS distributions (e.g. Iron, Kilted) are not officially tested, but they could work.

Build the package

The zed-ros-examples repository is a collection of colcon packages.

Open a terminal, clone the repository, update the dependencies, and build the packages:

cd ~/ros2_ws/src/ #use your current ros2 workspace folder
git clone https://github.com/stereolabs/zed-ros2-examples.git
cd ../
sudo apt update
rosdep update
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y --skip-keys scout_description
colcon build --symlink-install --cmake-args=-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
source ~/.bashrc

Tutorials and examples

Data Visualization Examples

• Example launch files to start a preconfigured instance of RViz2 displaying all the ZED Wrapper node information: zed_display_rviz2
• ROS 2 plugin for RViz2 to visualize the results of the Object Detection module (bounding boxes and skeletons): rviz-plugin-zed-od
• Example layouts to display ZED Wrapper data in Foxglove Studio zed_display_foxglove

Tutorials

• Images subscription tutorial
• Depth subscription tutorial
• Pose/Odometry subscription tutorial
• ROS 2 Composition + BGRA2BGR conversion tutorial
• Multi-camera
• Multi-Camera + Intra Process Communication
• Robot integration

Examples

• ZED Localization with ArUco markers: use localized ArUco tags as a reference for localization.
• Convert ZED Depth map to virtual laser scan: convert ZED Depth maps into virtual Laser Scans using

Tools

• ZED Benchmark tool: used to test topics and get statistics on frequency and bandwidth to be plotted.