Thanks for pointing me to your driver Kevin. I'll take a look at it.

About the stability issues of openni, here is my personal take on the
matter. I believe necessary action has been taken by members of the
ROS community. This thread captures a lot of it:
http://answers.ros.org/question/33622/openni_launch-not-working-in-fuerte-ubuntu-precise-1204/.
Unfortunately, I was unable to get any of the solutions to work. At
this time, I am not sure what the next best step is.

libfreenect is considerably simpler, easier to follow through, and
does not launch a separate daemon. More importantly, I can get it to
work. This might not be the best reason, but I found the libfreenect
based kinect_camera stack back in diamondback quite stable and easy to
use. Ever since the move to OpenNI, I have seen problems because of
driver instability or API transitions. This has led me to believe
(perhaps erroneously) that a libfreenect based driver will be more
stable. The caveat of course is that you cannot use other primesense
devices through the same driver, but I don't think this is a big
issue.

Piyush,

On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 10:12 PM, Edwards, Shaun M. <sedwards@swri.org> wrote:
>
> Is there a reason you didn't address the stability issues in the openni driver instead of switching to the libfreenect?
>
> By the way I think this is a critical issue. Many people use the kinect and having an unstable driver in ROS is a big black eye.
>
> Sent from my mobile phone