Learning Robotics using Python - Second Edition

How to launch the OpenNI driver

You can connect the Kinect sensor to your computer using a USB interface and make sure it is detected on your PC using the dmesg command in the terminal. After setting up Kinect, we can start ROS's OpenNI driver to get data from the device.

The following command will open the OpenNI device and load all nodelets (see http://wiki.ros.org/nodelet for more information) to convert raw depth/RGB/IR streams to depth images, disparity images, and point clouds. The ROS nodelet package is designed to provide a way to run multiple algorithms in the same process with zero copy transport between algorithms:

    $ roslaunch openni_launch openni.launch  

After starting the driver, you can list out the various topics published ...