Revision history [back]

So we ran Octomap + Kinect + lots of other tools on an i5. I think that was 4 threads and ran at ~3GHz. That setup used about 0.123374032 horsepower.

The biggest change for me was just making the pointcloud smaller. At full resolution, you get over 300,000 points per scan. At the smallest resolution, you get 19,200 which was more than enough for me. Be sure to check out the Reducing Kinect Resolution answer.

As for visualization, with 300,000 points at 30Hz, I know for sure that 2 GTX460 in SLI can do it. :P However, my laptop with Nvidia Quadro could visualize, but it really did make it hot and sometimes lagged out. The most important thing would be to make sure your graphics drivers are up to date and the latest version you can find.

Finally, watch out about the VoxelGrid filter. If you set the resolution too small, it will slow you down instead of helping you out. The algorithm in there is O(n^3) and will have to do operations for each cube. So if you pick something rather small like 0.01m, you'll basically be checking every mililitre (cm^3) in your Kinect volume. I think that 0.2m was good and 0.1m was about the lowest I would push that.

Also, running everything in the nodelets will help. I know they can be confusing, so take a look at my launch files. Main Launch and Filters Launch.

So we ran Octomap + Kinect + lots of other tools on an i5. I think that was 4 threads and ran at ~3GHz. That setup used about 0.123374032 horsepower.

The biggest change for me was just making the pointcloud smaller. At full resolution, you get over 300,000 points per scan. At the smallest resolution, you get 19,200 which was more than enough for me. Be sure to check out the Reducing Kinect Resolution answer.

As for visualization, with 300,000 points at 30Hz, I know for sure that 2 GTX460 in SLI can do it. :P However, my laptop with Nvidia Quadro could visualize, but it really did make it hot and sometimes lagged out. The most important thing would be to make sure your graphics drivers are up to date and the latest version you can find.

Finally, watch out about the VoxelGrid filter. If you set the resolution too small, it will slow you down instead of helping you out. The algorithm in there is O(n^3) and will have to do operations for each cube. So if you pick something rather small like 0.01m, you'll basically be checking every mililitre (cm^3) in your Kinect volume. I think that 0.2m was good and 0.1m was about the lowest I would push that.

Also, running everything in the nodelets will help. I know they can be confusing, so take a look at my launch files. Main Launch and Filters Launch.