Attention

As of June 30, 2025, the Isaac ROS Buildfarm for Isaac ROS 2.1 on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal is no longer supported.

Due to an isolated infrastructure event, all ROS 2 Humble Debian packages that were previously built for Ubuntu 20.04 are no longer available in the Isaac Apt Repository. All artifacts for Isaac ROS 3.0 and later are built and maintained with a more robust pipeline.

Users are encouraged to migrate to the latest version of Isaac ROS. The source code for Isaac ROS 2.1 continues to be available on the release-2.1 branches of the Isaac ROS GitHub repositories.

The original documentation for Isaac ROS 2.1 is preserved below.

Monocular Camera Calibration

Note

These instructions are specifically for a monocular camera. To calibrate a stereoscopic camera, see the camera_calibration instructions.

Set up your development environment by following the Developer Environment Setup.
Print a large checkerboard with known dimensions.

This tutorial uses a 6x8 checkerboard with 200mm squares. Calibration uses the interior vertex points of the checkerboard, so a “7x9” board uses the interior vertex parameter “6x8” as in the example below. Checkerboards with specific dimensions can be downloaded here.
Clone the ROS 2 usb_cam package:
```
cd ${ISAAC_ROS_WS}/src && \
  git clone -b ros2 https://github.com/ros-drivers/usb_cam
```
Note

Your camera vendor might offer a specific ROS 2-compatible camera driver package that can be used in place of the usb_cam package.

Launch the Docker container using the run_dev.sh script:

cd ${ISAAC_ROS_WS}/src/isaac_ros_common && \
  ./scripts/run_dev.sh

Inside the container, build, and source the workspace:

cd /workspaces/isaac_ros-dev && \
  colcon build --symlink-install && \
  source install/setup.bash

Run the usb_cam image publisher:

ros2 run usb_cam usb_cam_node_exe --remap __ns:=/my_camera --ros-args -p framerate:=30.0 -p image_height:=720 -p image_width:=1280

Attach another terminal to the Docker container using the run_dev.sh script:

cd ${ISAAC_ROS_WS}/src/isaac_ros_common && \
  ./scripts/run_dev.sh

Run the camera calibrator:

ros2 run camera_calibration cameracalibrator --size 6x8 --square 0.20 image:=/my_camera/image_raw camera:=/my_camera

Complete steps 6-8 from this camera calibration tutorial.
Make sure you press Calibrate and then the Save button.

You should see the following line in the second terminal:
```
('Wrote calibration data to', '/tmp/calibrationdata.tar.gz')
```
The calibration file will be stored at /tmp/calibrationdata.tar.gz.
After the calibration file has been saved, enter Ctrl+C in each terminal to stop the nodes.

Move the calibration file to the required location:

cd /workspaces/isaac_ros-dev/src/<isaac_ros_metapackage>/<isaac_ros_package>/config/ && \
tar -xvf /tmp/calibrationdata.tar.gz -C ./ ost.yaml && \
mv ost.yaml camera_info.yaml