Kinect Tutorial

NOTE before starting: I have not done a top to bottom run of this yet. I will be doing it soon though to double check. There may be some things that I left out because I am not a perfect note taker. Just waiting for another SD card so I can do the install without wasting my current progress.

Install Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial on the Pi

Ok, lets do this. First we need to download the image for the Pi. I am betting this will work with the Pi 2 as well but I only tested it on the Pi 3.Here are some links to some of the Pi images:

• Raspberry Pi 2
• Raspberry Pi 3 - Thanks to Ryan Finnie

I used an Ubuntu Laptop to format the SD card and write the image to it. But here is the tutorials from the Raspberry Pi foundation:

• Linux
• Mac
• Windows

Now boot up the raspberry pi. If you used the image from Ryan Finnie, the username/password is ubuntu. You will be prompted to change the password so remember what you change it to.

Install ROS (Kinetic Distro)

We have some updates first

	sudo apt-get update
	sudo apt-get upgrade -y
	#also install desktop if you want
	sudo apt-get install -y xubuntu-desktop
	#or sudo apt-get install -y lubuntu-desktop

view raw update-ubuntu.bash hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Then install ROS and setup your work space

	sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'
	sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://ha.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-key 0xB01FA116
	sudo apt-get update
	sudo apt-get install -y ros-kinetic-desktop
	sudo rosdep init
	rosdep update
	# Create ROS workspace
	echo "source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
	source ~/.bashrc
	source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash
	sudo apt-get install -y python-rosinstall
	sudo apt-get install -y python-roslaunch

view raw ubuntu-xenial-install-ros.bash hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Install Some ROS Packages

ROS has some packages that you can now install via apt. Here are the ones that I installed to work with the kinect and a few others that are useful as well

I had to reboot after this as well.

	# search for packages
	sudo apt-cache search ros-kinetic | grep "search term"
	# Install kinect packages
	sudo apt-get install -y freenect
	sudo apt-get install -y ros-kinetic-freenect-camera ros-kinetic-freenect-launch
	sudo apt-get install -y ros-kinetic-freenect-stack ros-kinetic-libfreenect

view raw ubuntu-xenial-ros-packages.bash hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Using Your Kinect With ROS

Now we can use ROS. If you are confused on how ROS works, the wiki is great at explaining things but is a little more in depth. I am bad at explaining things but can explain it in a dumb easy to understand way since that is the way I think. I'll put a link to a future post here. I have put together a list of handy commands here to get the kinect up and running in ROS

Here is how you start the core ROS process which will be the "master"

roscore

view raw roscore.bash hosted with ❤ by GitHub

I like to run the process in the foreground and just open a new terminal but that is up to you. In a new terminal you can start the node for the kinect by running

roslaunch freenect_launch freenect.launch

view raw freenect-launch.bash hosted with ❤ by GitHub

ROS should be publishing topics now. A topic is like a data object or an endpoint of an API. You can see the topics by running

rostopic list

view raw rostopic-list.bash hosted with ❤ by GitHub

You will notice that one of the endpoints is /camera/rgb/image_color. We can look at the RGB image with image_view like so

rosrun image_view image_view image:=/camera/rgb/image_color

view raw view-rgb-kinect-ros.bash hosted with ❤ by GitHub

That should bring up a small window in which you can see what your Kinect sees in RGB. Now you can mess with it and see some other cool stuff as well since the Kinect node publishes several different data types.

Bill of Materials

• Raspberry Pi 3
• Kinect for Xbox 360 - I got mine at GameStop for ~$35 w/ the AC adapter
• AC Adapter 
• If you don't already have a bunch of Micro USB Cables, you will need one for the raspberry pi
• Keyboard & Mouse for working on the pi

Works Cited

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqOkpZBOpxY
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23901220/how-do-i-get-kinect-depth-image-data-in-centimeters-using-the-libfreenect-python
• http://mathnathan.com/2011/02/depthvsdistance/
• https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/openkinect/k6exs5hDyQ4
• http://wiki.ros.org/rosbag/Code%20API
• http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/internal/courses/int-robot/2015/notes/map.php
• http://wiki.ros.org/kinetic/Installation/Ubuntu 
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