[ros-users] ROS on windows or in virtualbox?

[Chris Jones]

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?

-- 
Chris Jones
Overthrow Robotics
chris.jones at overthrowrobotics.com
310-400-0256
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