Kinect as robot camera and some other questions

[smclean1969]

We used the Kinect as our camera last year and it took a lot of extra work to make it happen. As mentioned, we needed an on board processor that preprocessed the imagery and then sent it to the driver's station. There was a lot of custom code but when it was done, it worked well. The kit of parts camera, though, was used by three of the top five teams on the Newton field in St Louis last year. If it worked for them, then it's probably good enough for almost everyone.

[Sanchez_Man]

We tried to do Kinect on the robot using java last year. We found that it could be done using the OpenKinect Libraries as well as Processing. Unfortunately, it only works on Mac OSX (We tried for a week to get it to work on linux). We eventually tried to run Macintosh on a cheap netbook, but despite that fact that the netbook was touted as being "Hackintosh" compatible, it wasn't.

I know of one team that got it to work. They used Microsoft's Kinect SDK and used UDP to send packets between an onboard computer and the cRIO via an ethernet cable.