How to use Kinect in ROS?

Quick Intro about Kinect:

Kinect is a RGB-D based motion sensing input device product line by Microsoft. It was announced and demonstrated for Xbox 360 video game platform named as Project Natal in June 2009. The first generation Kinect was first released on November 2010. Since then it attracts the attention of researchers and robotics developer community due to its immense possibility compare to traditional vision based system.

 Kinect was developed based on the software technology by Rare and on range camera technology by Prime Sense which developed a system that can interpret specific gestures, making completely hands-free control of electronic devices. Kinect features an RGB camera, depth sensor and multi-array microphone. The depth sensor consists of IR laser projector combined with CMOS sensor which captures 3D video data. The RGB camera is located between the IR projector and IR camera, which has no role in depth measurement.

Kinect was originally designed and released to be used in Microsoft Xbox 360 game console. No external driver was provided by the manufacturer. But as Kinect grabs attraction to the researchers and robotic development community, in November 2010, Adafruit Industries offered a bounty for an open-source driver for Kinect and in the same month Adafruit announced Hector Martin as the winner who produced a Linux driver for Kinect that allows using both of the RGB camera and depth sensitivity functions. It was named Open Kinect libfreenect which is the core library for accessing the Microsoft Kinect. Another open source framework, OpenNI framework was introduced by OpenNI organization. It provides for Kinect an application programming interface (API). There are 12 different nodes available in OpenNI framework for different functionalities.

Quick Intro on ROS:

Robot Operating System (ROS) is an open-source, heterogeneous and scalable P2P network-based robotics framework. ROS provides wide range of libraries and tools to help software developers creating innovative robot applications in an organized pattern. The benefit of using ROS is to get some useful essential features which will reduce the development time and complexity by providing device drivers, libraries, visualizers, message-passing, package management, access to third party tools, hardware abstraction, and more. ROS is licensed under an open source, BSD license. The basic advantage of ROS is code reuse for the robotic developer and researcher in a common and generalized platform. ROS is a language-independent architecture (C++, python, lisp, java, and more), scalable platform (ARM CPUs to Xeon Clusters) and intent to enable researchers to rapidly develop new robotic systems by increasing the re-usability through use of standard tools and interfaces.

There are not many Robot frameworks out there which support the development of general purpose robot software across many platforms. This makes it difficult to accomplish even simple and trivial tasks which might seem simple to humans but the Robot developer has to navigate and sort through many variations between instances of tasks and environments. Having a general purpose framework like ROS helps us to create complex and robust robot behavior across many platforms which have got the support of ROS.

• Peer to Peer
• Multi Language Support
• Free and open source

Now to work with Kinect and ROS in Linux environment, a ROS based kinect driver is needed.  Once the Linux environment is set with ROS installation the Freenect stack setup is enough to communicate with kinect sensor through ROS. A sudo apt get command is enough for that.

sudo apt-get install libfreenect-dev
sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-freenect-launch

For executing the command a internet connection is needed. This will install the kinect driver into ROS. After that connect the kinect device with USB and also make sure the power cable is connected. Then run the freenect launch command to start driver.

roslaunch freenect_launch freenect.launch

The package link is available here.