Configuring TurtleBot and installing the 3D sensor software

There are minor but important environmental variables and software that are needed for the TurtleBot based on your selection of 3D sensors. We have attached a Kinect Xbox 360 sensor to our TurtleBot, but we will provide instructions to configure each of the 3D sensors mentioned in this chapter. These environmental variables are used by the ROS launch files to launch the correct camera drivers. In ROS Indigo, the Kinect and ASUS sensors are supported by different camera drivers, as described in the following sections.

Kinect

The environmental variables for the Kinect sensors are as follows:

export KINECT_DRIVER=freenect
export TURTLEBOT_3D_SENSOR=kinect

These variables should be added to the ~/.bashrc files of both the TurtleBot and the remote computer.

Kinect also requires a special driver for the camera to be downloaded from GitHub. Type the following commands in a terminal window on the TurtleBot netbook:

$ mkdir ~/kinectdriver
$ cd...