Hi all,
I would love to have an event camera plugin for Gazebo. In event cameras, each pixel operates independently and fires an event once a pre-set threshold in change of brightness was exceeded. This implies that there is no concept of conventional frames anymore; absolute brightness information is not available. For more info, please see Wikipedia or this amazing survey.
There have been some attempts to simulate event cameras, including rpg_esim and v2e (video2events) [apologies, I’m only allowed two links …]. These tools typically take a video as input, use some super slow-motion approach to temporally sample more finely, and then simulate the events.
I think it would be amazing to instead have a plugin for Gazebo that simulates event cameras directly without the intermediate step of using a video.
Unfortunately, I am not well versed in Gazebo / writing plugins for Gazebo. However, I am willing to learn, have good knowledge of ROS (as one of the RoboStack maintainers) and potentially could get a student to work on it, if I get some pointers on where to start / what would be needed for this project. I’d also be more than happy to collaborate with someone who has similar interests.
Best wishes,
Tobi