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realsense-ros

  • Software
  • Perception
  • Driver or SDK

ROS 2 driver that connects Intel RealSense depth cameras to ROS 2, publishing their color, depth, infrared, IMU and point cloud streams as ROS topics.

Made by RealSenseAI.

Source on GitHub: github.com/realsenseai/realsense-ros (opens in a new tab). Facts read at commit 7a87097 (opens in a new tab).

Licenses

Code
Apache-2.0 (opens in a new tab)

Read by Robotheca from LICENSE (opens in a new tab) (Apache-2.0) at commit 7a87097 (opens in a new tab), on 16 Oct 2026.

Commercial use
Yes

What it does

  • Starts the camera as a ROS 2 node with parameters for stream profiles, formats and enable flags, launchable with ros2 run or ros2 launch.
  • Publishes camera, depth, infrared, color, IMU and metadata topics, plus extrinsics and TF transforms.
  • Offers post-processing filters such as spatial, temporal and pointcloud, each toggled through parameters.
  • Provides services for hardware reset, device info and calibration config read/write, plus a RViz2 plugin and diagnostics.
  • Supports multiple cameras via camera name and namespace, and can play back rosbag files instead of a live device.
  • Includes an optional ROS 2 Lifecycle Node build flag, which disables image_transport and compressed image topics.

Written by Robotheca from the project's README (opens in a new tab) at commit 7a87097.

Getting started

Difficulty
Beginner
Hardware it needs, as the project states it
A RealSense camera and a ROS 2 install (Humble, Jazzy, Kilted, Iron or Foxy) on Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04 or 24.04; Windows is not officially supported. Optional GPU acceleration needs a build flag.

Maintenance

Status
Active: a commit in the last 90 days
Newest commit
11 Oct 2026 on ros2-master
Latest release
ROS Wrapper for RealSense cameras - v4.59.1 beta Latest (11 Oct 2026)

Checked on GitHub on 16 Oct 2026.

Links

Robots on Robotheca that use it

No robot on Robotheca is linked to it yet. Links come from a robot's robot.yaml, from its dependency files read as text, or from Robotheca's editors.

Robotheca lists software as a reference: nothing is hosted or run here, and every fact links to where it was read.