Kinect Updates Thread

[MrTechCenter]

So everybody found their Kinect in their kit of parts today right? Well, I created this thread for everyone to share "discoveries" they made about it. For example, when somebody cracks the "How to connect the Kinect to the cRIO" conundrum, please post it here so everybody can see it. Good luck with Rebound Rumble, from Team 2073!

[davidthefat]

Not even going to open ours this year.

[Dusk Star]

To connect to cRIO: place pandaboard running linux on robot to interface between the kinect and the cRIO. Program the pandaboard to do all of your image processing, outputing only a x,y and distance value to the cRIO. from other threads it seems like you should get ~30 fps processed this way, depending on how intensive your code is. of course, all power connections have to be done custom.

As an extra option, do not connect the pandaboard to the cRIO, but instead get it approved to communicate with your driver station laptop via wifi, per [R67]

[R67]
Any decorations that involve broadcasting a signal to/from the Robot, such as remote cameras, must be approved by FIRST (via e-mail to frcteams@usfirst.org) prior to the event and tested for communications interference at the venue. Such devices, if reviewed and approved, are excluded from Rule [R55].

If you did this, you could probably just do all the image processing on your driver station laptop, and view the image besides.

[Dusk Star]

Forgot to put R55 in there:

[R55]
One D-Link DAP-1522 is the only permitted device for communicating to and from the Robot during the match. All signals must originate from the Operator Console and be transmitted to the Robot via the official Arena hardware. No other form of wireless communications shall be used to communicate to, from or within the Robot (e.g. radio modems from previous FIRST competitions and Bluetooth devices are not permitted on the Robot during competition).


Teams are encouraged to mount the wireless bridge away from noise generating devices such as the CIM motors. By making the diagnostic lights visible, Arena personnel are in a better position to assist teams.

[Ernst]

Originally Posted by davidthefat

Not even going to open ours this year.

You Kinect or your Kit?

[davidthefat]

Originally Posted by ZehP

You Kinect or your Kit?

Kinect. My mentality is that I would rather take the human factor out of the "hybrid" mode and have an effective and precise autonomous robot over the non intuitive controls that the Kinect provides. I rather use the time messing with the Kinect giving lectures on some basic theory on control theory and give the rookies an overview of the whole process and the math behind it.

[sjspry]

There's a thread in the programming section which really got going. Basically, putting the kinect on the robot is going to cost your team roughly $200 and programming time. While I didn't know about [R67], the hardware required to process the USB signal and send it back amounts to a computer -- the devboards being the lighter and cheaper of the two options (devboard/laptop).

What also needs to be considered... Will it be helpful in either case? Like davidthefat was saying, it is somewhat unintuitive, as well as not necessarily providing any useful information. I could only see wanting to provide the robot with static information, which could be accomplished in some other, non-error-prone way. Or, assuming you did get it working on the robot, would the depth data from the IR camera really be helpful? You should know distance based on your starting position anyway.

[Flimsor]

You could always put another laptop on the robot and have it communicate that way.

[alfredtwo]

Note that if you find the default gestures non intuitive you can program your own. The sample code is fairly well documented.