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Dear ROS Community,<br>
<br>
I am Thiemo from the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the
University of Bremen. I am currently a PhD Student under the
supervision of Prof. Michael Beetz. I'm writing this together with
Alexis Maldonado, another PhD Student at our lab, who has helped
mainly with the hardware aspects.<br>
<br>
In the past few months I developed a toolkit for the Kinect v2
including: a ROS interface to the device (driver) using
libfreenect2, an intrinsics/extrinsics calibration tool, an improved
depth registration method using OpenCL, a lightweight
pointcloud/images viewer based on the PCL visualizer and OpenCV.<br>
<br>
The system has been developed for and tested in both ROS Hydro and
Indigo (Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04)<br>
<br>
The driver has been improved to reach high performance, meaning to
be able to process the sensor's information at full framerate (30Hz)
on acceptable hardware (not only high-end machines). This was
achieved through parallelization of the image pipeline. Care has
also been taken to be able to transfer the complete data over
compressed topics to other PCs (30Hz data uses approx. 40Mbytes/s on
the network).<br>
<br>
Specially interesting for other people with a PR2 robot: we have
built a small mITX computer using an AMD A10-7850K processor, and a
PicoPSU. It is installed as a backpack on our PR2, and a Kinect v2
on the head above the cameras. This 'backpack-PC' is necessary
because the built-in computers on the PR2 don't support USB3 and
they are quite loaded with their normal workload.<br>
<br>
We are glad to announce the release of the software for ROS
community, hoping it will be useful for others, specially people
working in robotics research. Please see the following GitHub
repository:<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://github.com/code-iai/iai_kinect2">https://github.com/code-iai/iai_kinect2</a><br>
<br>
You will need a slightly patched version of libfreenect2, as
indicated on the README. It is here:<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://github.com/wiedemeyer/libfreenect2">https://github.com/wiedemeyer/libfreenect2</a><br>
<br>
Screenshots are also on the GitHub page.<br>
<br>
We are looking forward to improvements and/or bug reports. Please
use the GitHub tools for that.<br>
<br>
Best regards,<br>
<br>
Thiemo and Alexis<br>
<br>
Institute for Artificial Intelligence<br>
University of Bremen<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://ai.uni-bremen.de">https://ai.uni-bremen.de</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
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