Since the Primesense Carmine 1.09 close range camera was pulled from the market I've been trying to figure out a replacement for my boxing robot.
I need skeleton tracking and close range. Standard Kinect/Asus doesn't quite work up close but the 1.09 camera did.
I got the Structure.io camera to work with NITE 2 for skeleton tracking but it also doesn't work as well up close as I hoped.
There's no skeleton tracking for the Creative Labs Senz3D yet so that's out. I've looked at some other lesser known RGB-D cameras and they didn't have linux support yet.
So I'm left with a single option. The Kinect for Windows 2 camera. The camera is amazing and the SDK blows away what could be done with NITE. But... it's Windows 8 only. The open source KFW drivers are just not there yet. No skeleton support, etc.
The options I see are:
a) Run ROS entirely under Windows 8 though there doesn't seem to be very good support.
b) Run Ubuntu/Hydro in Virtualbox and send messages (Kinect quaternions) through the virtualbox api and turn that into a ROS message.
c) Run ROS in Windows as a slave node to a master ROS node running in Ubuntu.
If I just want to run ROS Hydro in Windows for sending some Kinect quaternion/TF frames over the network to Ubuntu/Hydro for the rosqt, etc heavy lifting is that possible?
Any other suggestions?
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Chris Jones
Overthrow Robotics
310-400-0256