Kinect on ROS

Yeterday I bought a Kinect Stereo Camera and started playing with it. It was very easy to start. I only followed the instructions of this Wiki and it worked out of the box, and only had to modify some instructions but it was very intuitive to do.

The instructions are listed n this URL: http://www.ros.org/wiki/openni_kinect

Just in the section when you launch the program for the Kinect you need to launch the following (You don't need to run a roscore):

Go to:

/opt/ros/diamondback/stacks/openni_kinect/openni_camera/launch

The direction can be different if you installed ROS in other directory

And then roslaunch openni_node.launch

Next the process with the rviz is the same, try to use points and RGB so you can get amazing images in 3D.

The first image I got was from my room:

The next two images were from our robotics laboratory in the ITESM CEM:

Now the next step is to work in the algorithm that will allow us to implement stereo vision in ROS, LabView, Java and many other platforms.

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Starting a new semester

I've been out for a while, but now I have some news about my research. The minoru webcam is still on it's way home (I just ordered last week because of money problems =() so I wasn't able to use it since march, but no problem I managed to but a Microsoft Kinect and the results are awesome.

I'm running all my programs on ROS Diamondback on UBUNTU Lucid, I needed to format my MacBook and partition my hardisk so I could use all the resources of my computer. The process was simple, first i installed the default settings using the MacOSX disc. First I deleted the content of my hard drive (insert the CD, double click it and restart. Use disk utility to delete the hard drive) and then installed MacOSX.  Next download and install ReFit on your Mac and restart twice so you can see the selection OS window each time you restart.

Now go to disk utility and partition your hard drive and select blanc format, now that you have selected the amount of space you want (my hard drive is of 250 Gb so I selected 100 Gb to install Ubuntu), insert the CD of Ubuntu (you can download an ISO file from the Ubuntu WebPage and create an installation CD in disk utilities) and restart. Now you will enter to the Ubuntu installation menu, follow all the process of installation (I prefer to install it in english is far more easy to work with because almost all the tutorials are in this languaje and ROS and ROS Wiki were writen in that languaje.) and then follow these tutorial to set it up for your Mac.

Here are some guided instructions to get it done:

http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5629845718113768813

Make shure that the model of your computer and the version of Ubuntu you are using are the same of the manual, there are many series of instructions for almos any computer.

Now I will post the progress with the Kinect Stereo Camera. Good Luck! ;-)