robotics Tutorial

How To Setup Kinect with ROS and RGBD SLAM

I recently setup a Kinect with ROS for SLAM  but the instructions are all spread out. So, in this tutorial we go through the steps required to setup a Microsoft Kinect with ROS and do some cool live 3D SLAM with the kinect and RGBD SLAM algorithm.

Tested Configuration: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, ROS Indigo, Kinect Model 1473 (Kinect for Xbox 360 purchased in 2014)

Installing and configuring:

  1. Install libfreenect and required packages to run kinect: $sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-freenect-launch ros-indigo-openni-launch libfreenect-dev
  2. Source your ROS setup: $source /opt/ros/indigo/setup.bash
  3. Create a catkin workspace if you don’t have one with instructions here.
  4. Setup rosdep with instructions here.
  5. Clone RGBDSLAM V2 from here into the ~/catkin_ws/src directory.
  6. $cd ~/catkin_ws
  7. $source devel/setup.bash
  8. Install RGBD SLAM dependencies: $rosdep install rgbdslam
  9. Make RGBD-SLAM: $catkin_make

Running:

  1. Open 3 terminal windows.
  2. In the first we run the ros core server: $roscore
  3. In the second we launch the kinect driver: $roslaunch freenect_launch freenect.launch
  4. In the third we launch RGBD SLAM: $roslaunch rgbdslam rgbdslam.launch

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