Questions about the Kinect

Technical Programming
1

I am posting on behalf of my former team -

We are trying to setup an XBox Kinect so that we can utilize human gestures to drive the robot around and activate commands. We plan to use this as a fun demonstration for newcomers and potential recruits. We have not used the Kinect before so we’re mostly in the dark here.

We got the Kinect to work after installing the Kinect for Windows SDK and the Kinect drivers onto the host computer and running a program on the Kinect Development Tools Browser that outputs the skeleton detected by the Kinect.

After some research we’ve found that FRC discontinued DS support for the Kinect a while back. However, this documentation: https://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/4485/m/13811/l/292165-labview-porting-guide-2014-to-2015
implies that we can use the Kinect as an input device if we “modify the Kinect server to send data directly to the robot using Network Tables or one of the ports available on the field network.”

Our problem is that we do not know how to “modify the Kinect server” to send this data. Some old tutorials involving the Kinect provided a dead download link for the Kinect server, and we could not find another place to download this software.

Additionally, we aren’t sure what sort of data the Kinect will send using NetworkTables and how we can use that to activate commands.

If anyone could help us with this, that would be very much appreciated!

2

When it says “Modify the Kinect” it really means plug your Kinect into the Driver Station PC, and run some custom code.

You can use Windows’ Kinect SDK, or libfreenect along with some simple code to send the data you’re interested in from the DS to the Robot. You can use regular sockets for this.

I would recommend the Windows Kinect SDK over libfreenect in this particular case since it allows you to grab the skeletons as they’re processed, as opposed to just the raw image like libfreenect.

3

This is really cool. Currently, we have a couple students on our team that are programming the controls again so that it can be driven with a Dance Dance Revolution mat. We hope to use it at our local off season, Ruckus.