Interfacing Kinect and Asus Xtion Pro with ROS

The webcams that we have worked with until now can only provide 2D visual information of their surroundings. To get 3D information about our surroundings, we must use 3D vision sensors or range finders, such as laser finders. Some of the 3D vision sensors that we will be discussing in this chapter are Kinect, Asus Xtion Pro, Intel RealSense, and Hokuyo laser scanner:

Figure 10.7 – Top: Kinect; bottom: Asus Xtion Pro

The first two sensors we are going to discuss are Kinect and Asus Xtion Pro. Both of these devices need the Open Source Natural Interaction (OpenNI) driver library to operate in Linux. OpenNI acts as a middleware between the 3D vision devices and the application software. The OpenNI driver is integrated into ROS, and we can install these drivers by using the following commands. These packages help us interface OpenNI-supported devices such as Kinect and Asus Xtion Pro:

sudo apt install...