'Waiting for images' only when adding an object to the simulation

[OdedHorowits]

Hi

So this is a weird phenomena.
When the room I created is empty, everything works fine.
However, when I just add an object to the world *.sdf file, the orb_slam is not working.
But I didn't change anything but adding that model!
What can be the issue??

This is how I add the object:

    <include>
      <uri>
        model://basic_room_big
      </uri>
      <name>basic_room_0</name>
      <pose>0 0 -0.09 0 0 0</pose>
    </include>

    <include>
      <uri>
        model://Sofa
      </uri>
      <pose>7 0 0 0 0 3.1416</pose>
    </include>
...

Why would it have any influence on the orb_slam node?

p.s.
Adding another object works ok.
In both cases I dont get any warning on the terminal where Gazebo was launched from.

[suchetanrs]

Hi, that is very strange :p
I have not worked with ignition gazebo to tell you what might be happening.
However, it might be useful to run gazebo in verbose mode to look at the detailed logs. Something like this existed on gazebo classic. Not sure what the command is for ignition.
Let me know if you find something on this.

Also, can you please check if the topic is actually receiving data and the issue is not from the wrapper's end?

[OdedHorowits]

Hi

So adding verbose mode didn't reveal anything.
Here is something similar that happened - I have a simple *.sdf file that defines a box with an image a material. That is my wall object. The orb_slam wrapper works fine when I define the image to be a.png but fails when I define it to be b.png.
To eliminate suspects, I created b.img by opening a.png and removing all its content to get a white image for a white wall.

Attached is a screenshot from calling ros2 launch orb_slam3_ros2_wrapper unirobot.launch.py when using b.png:

[suchetanrs]

Hi @OdedHorowits , thanks for your reply.
I think this issue is more on the gazebo end than the ORB-SLAM3 end. An issue where messages were not being transported to the ORB-SLAM3 docker was reported earlier as well. Switching to cyclonedds as the rmw both on the docker and on the host fixed the issue. Please have a look at this comment #8 (comment)
Anyway, even if this is not the issue, it might be more helpful to see if gazebo ign is able to render the image message on gazebo before being bridged to ROS. Please try to add an image viewer to your gazebo world setup to see if you are able to view the images on the gazebo gui before you can see them on RViz/ ORB-SLAM3.