Interfacing Orbbec Astra with ROS

One of the alternatives to Kinect is Orbbec Astra. There are ROS drivers available for Astra, and we can see how to set up that driver and get the image, depth, and point cloud from this sensor.

Installing the Astra–ROS driver

The complete instructions to set up the Astra-ROS driver in Ubuntu are mentioned at https://github.com/orbbec/ros_astra_camera and http://wiki.ros.org/Sensors/OrbbecAstra. After installing the driver, you can launch it using the following command:

    $ roslaunch astra_launch astra.launch  

You can also install the Astra driver from the ROS package repository. Here is the command to install those packages:

    $ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-astra-camera
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