[ros-users] ROS, Kinect

[Radu Bogdan Rusu]

And here's a link to ros-kinect@ (thanks Stephane!) for those interested in subscribing:

https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-kinect

Cheers,
Radu.


On 11/17/2010 02:43 AM, Radu Bogdan Rusu wrote:
> 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.
>