Thread: Running the Kinect on the Robot.
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Unread 05-01-2012, 09:18
Greg McKaskle Greg McKaskle is offline
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Re: Running the Kinect on the Robot.
The academic robotics group at NI did have a Kinect mounted and running on a superdroid chassis for awhile. Here are some additional considerations.

Power:
The Kinect is not a five volt USB device. The cable that comes from the Kinect is an XBox shaped connector that will not plug straight into a laptop or other USB connectors. To connect to a pc or laptop requires an adapter cable that changes the shape of the connector and plugs into a 110 AC. I believe it provides about 12 watts at 12 volts DC to the Kinect. Not a huge deal, but not normal USB plug-n-play either. I have no experience to predict how the Kinect would behave in low voltage situations.

Mounting:
The Kinect mechanicals were intended to be mounted in a stationary position. Supporting the sensor bar to isolate it from shake and vibration is something to consider. The academic team mentioned above eventually mounted theirs upside down. Also, the servos that connect the bar to the base are not for continuous use.

Cameras:
The color camera on the Kinect has resolutions of 1280x1024 compressed, 640x480, and 320x240. The lower resolutions are not compressed. The IR camera supports 320x240, 160x120,and 80x60 uncompressed. The color format, at least through the MS drivers is often 32 bit xRGB, but there is some support for YUV 16 bit. Depth data is 13 bit resolution, and the drivers sometimes combine 3bit player info into it. To transfer video to the DS, compression is likely needed.

Drivers and Control:
Driver options are MS or OpenNI (not related to National Instruments, but to Natural Interface). MS drivers require Win7.

Interference:
The Kinect depth sensor works by projecting an IR wavelength patterned light image In front of the sensor bar, viewing the light patterns that return to the IR camera, and processing the data to map distortions in the pattern to 3D depth values. To work reliably, the IR camera needs to be able to be able to measure the light dots. Other IR light projected onto the field, by other Kinects, by spotlights, or other lighting may cause interference.

Hope this info helps.
Greg Mckaskle