[ros-users] ROS, Kinect

[Radu Bogdan Rusu]

Hi all!

We just got our Kinects at Willow Garage, so we're ready to join the party! As we plan to invest lots of resources to 
support the development of our 3D libraries and higher level applications with sensors such as Kinect, this is the 
perfect time to start contributing to your efforts, and centralize the development... Since we're looking for maximum 
harmony here... code re-usability... no wasted efforts, etc :)


We would really like to thank all the pioneers of this effort! It's been amazing to see how fast the community moved in 
the last few days, and it's definitely exciting to see an avalanche of e-mails every hour or so with updates and 
improvements for the existing code bases.


Some of our developers that use ROS (http://ros.org) have gathered together and joined forces (similar to how OpenKinect 
did) to provide a stable and reliable architecture for Kinect in ROS. With that in mind, we created a neutral repository 
where we can easily iterate over the development of Kinect drivers and the integration with our PCL (Point Cloud Library 
- http://pcl.ros.org) and OpenCV (http://opencv.willowgarage.com) computer vision libraries. As always, we are fully 
committed to make _everything_ available as open source, under a BSD license (huray!).


Many thanks to (alphabetically): Ivan Dryanovski, Stéphane Magnenat, William Morris, Alex Trevor for their ROS 
integration efforts, and to Oliver Kreylos and Hector Martin (to name a few...) for interesting discussions and for 
developing parts of the project!


So please join our new mailing list at ros-kinect at code.ros.org if you're interested in discussing or help developing 
with Kinect in ROS. For general discussions about Kinect that are not ROS related, we should use the OpenKinect mailing 
list/group. If you're interested in developing or working with PCL, please contact us at pcl-users at code.ros.org.


Status:

  * repositories up at: https://github.com/ros-pkg-git/libfreenect (branch for faster iterations) and 
https://github.com/ros-pkg-git/kinect (ROS support for Kinect)

  * our libfreenect branch just got support for multiple Kinect cameras

  * ROS drivers (nodes and nodelets -- for "no-de/serialization" (tm) consumers ;) publishing PointCloud and PointCloud2 
messages (among other things)

  * preliminary support for accelerometers (thanks to Stephane) and motors (thanks to Melonee) - more to come

  * lots of people working on calibration - more to come in the next few days

  * ...

We will need to sync several wiki pages tomorrow and make sure that everyone is happy with the centralization, everyone 
interested has commit access, we didn't step on anyone's toes (hopefully!), etc :)


Within the next few days, we'll offer complete integration and tutorials/demos for segmentation, filtering, object 
recognition, registration, etc using PCL, so stay tuned! ;) Exciting times.

-- 
Cheers,
Radu.