Colin Rooney

Robot Eyes: Vision & Pose

Give any robot eyes with the iPhone you already have. Robot Eyes records color video, LiDAR depth, IMU and camera pose in the open Stray Scanner dataset format, and at the same time streams the camera over one USB cable to the robot's computer, from one camera session, so the stream and the recording share one clock. It was built to drive the Robo Bump Truck, an RC truck that steers itself from this camera.

Requires

An iPhone with a LiDAR scanner (iPhone 12 Pro and later Pro models), iOS 18.6 or newer. No account, no cloud, no analytics.

Getting started

  1. Open the camera and press Record. Stop when done; the session appears in the list with its start and end time.
  2. Open the session and tap Share to export a ZIP (AirDrop, Files, or any app). Select lets you share several at once.
  3. To stream: on the computer run iproxy 7790 7790 and connect a receiver to 127.0.0.1:7790. A ROS 2 camera node (Humble and Jazzy) is included in the app's repository.
  4. Calibration: every session carries a ROS camera_info.yaml built from Apple's factory calibration. Settings › Calibrate shows it; "Start guided capture" walks you through a checkerboard check if you want one.

Common questions

  • "USB listening" but nothing connects. Listening means the app is ready; it cannot see the cable. The computer must run USB forwarding (usbmuxd + iproxy) and a receiver program.
  • The picture is grey. That is the depth view. Tap the picture once for color.
  • "Wait for 60" on the HUD. Only in the Robo Bump Truck preset; it is a grading rule for that robot. Other presets don't show it.
  • Encoder failed. Tap Reset stream. If it returns, close and reopen the app.

Links

Contact

Bugs, questions, ideas: colin@rooneytech.com. Include the session id (the ten-character code on the session row) and, if you can, the diagnostics log from Settings.