Kinect on the robot?
 

Hello all, our team today was discussing strategy (and a little bit of design) for this years game. During this the question got raised, can we have a Kinect sensor on the robots? Now, in accordance to R49 B our robot can not have a connection with the Operator Console at no more than 7 Mbits/second, so if we can have Kinect on our robot, is there a way to compress the video? (in the bit of research I've done it says Kinect transmits about 24 Mbits/second)

Re: Kinect on the robot?
 

Team 987 used the Kinect on their robot in 2012. They used another processor board to process all the information and pass it on to the control system. Since the RobotRIO now has USB ports you could do this on the new control system but it will likely overload the processor (our testing showed that even processing USB camera images on the RoboRIO in Java or C++ puts a heavy load on the processor - LabView code seemed to handle it better). So, you will probably want to implement it as they did with a separate processor.

See: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=106634

Re: Kinect on the robot?
 

I haven't seen many teams use the kinect, we only used it for one year. We used an on board computer, the odroid x2 to be exact, to do all of our image processing.

I do not know how a kinect would interact with the Roborio for I know nothing about it.

If you want some sample code for the kinect in c or c++, just ask and I will be more than happy to direct you to a lot of code our team has developed with the kinect.

Re: Kinect on the robot?
 

If you want to use the Kinect, you will need to identify what you want to use. It has a camera, IR image, and depth camera ... and pretty cool microphones too. Oh, and it can of course recognize human skeletons, which is a very expensive part and not very helpful since totes don't look that much like scarecrows.

So the OpenNI or similar linux drivers are probably where I'd start. Only use the features you need such as the depth map, and ask questions if you have issues.

Greg McKaskle