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Getting a Kinect to work on a Pandaboard is possible, but I will tell you now that it is computationally very expensive for the Pandaboard to read out the Kinect data. As I said in another question, if you have the Kinect working and sending its data to the Pandaboard, there is little computational power left for SLAM, sending it over WiFi is a bad idea as well. I have not tried to use the Kinect on the Pandaboard with just SLAM, but my experience is that the Pandaboard would get hot rather quickly, scale down its CPU and then you have one very slow brain.

So to sum up: be careful if you want to do this, with what you let the Pandaboard do as calculations.

I have a Pandaboard with Ubuntu 11.10 and ROS Fuerte installed, indeed from source as none of the packages are available for ARM.

What I did was compile the OpenNI drivers from source, using (if I remember correctly) these steps:

  • Download the OpenNI source from https://github.com/OpenNI/OpenNI and compile it using the ARM compiler and install it
  • Download the NITE middleware source (for which I cannot find the link at the moment?) and compile it using ARM and install it
  • Download the avin2 SensorKinect driver (https://github.com/avin2/SensorKinect), compile it for ARM and install it

I am not sure if the NITE middleware SDK was mandatory or optional, you can try without. Also, I believe the OpenNI had to be set to use the BULK USB interface for ARM devices, otherwise it wouldn't communicate properly.

If you got this far, try one of the OpenNI samples and see if they work. If they do, it is just a matter of letting ROS know OpenNI is installed and where it is installed.

Good luck!