It seems that primesense is no longer improving the 1.x version of the openni driver, and the 2.x version is a ways off. That said, Willow Garage is working on improving openni driver situation for the asus and the kinect. I don't have a firm date on when there will be a nicely working version for ubuntu 12.04, but people are actively working on it and things should improve over the next couple of months, so don't lose hope.

At the same time, having a libfreenect-based ROS node sounds like a great idea. Neither the openni or libfreenect solution seem to have everything that everyone needs, so people will be able to choose which package to use based on the device they are using, the OS they are on, and the exact features they need. Wherever possible, the two should have similar APIs, in terms of the ROS topics that they publish and the parameters that they expose.

On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 3:04 PM, Ivan Dryanovski <ivan.dryanovski@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Piyush,

This is an idea I've been considering for a while, for the same reasons you already outlined. Do you have any information on Asus Xtion Pro Live support? As far as I know:

* the OpenNI drivers supports the Asus directly (albeit not very robustly, depending on the Ubuntu version).
* the master branch of freenect does not support the Asus
* there exists a version of the freenect driver modified for the Asus [1]

I would be willing to contribute time for a stable driver which works seamlessly with both the Kinect and Asus hardware.

Cheers,

Ivan

[1] https://github.com/zarvox/libfreenect/tree/xtion
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