ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Using fovis with the Kinect RGBD camera

At this point, we are going to run fovis for the Kinect RGBD camera. This means that we are going to have 3D information to compute the visual odometry, so better results are expected than when we use stereo vision or a monocular camera (as with viso2).

We simply have to launch the Kinect RGBD camera driver and fovis. For convenience, we provide a single launch file that runs both:

    $ roslaunch chapter5_tutorials fovis_demo.launch  

Move the camera around and you should be able to have a good odometry estimation of the trajectory followed by the camera. The next figure shows this on rviz in the initial state before moving the camera. You can see the RGBD point cloud and two arrows showing the odometry ...