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Rosjava + Android phone + Kinect, is it possible?

asked 2011-05-22 08:41:00 -0600

drcross gravatar image

updated 2016-10-24 08:59:02 -0600

ngrennan gravatar image

Hi All,

The announcement of the Java wrapper to run ROS on Android phones is really exciting. I was wondering how someone might connect a Kinect to an android phone to use it as a sensor? I'd like to build a small robot and an Android phone seems like a great alternative to a fully blown laptop.

Any help would be appreciated.

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answered 2011-05-23 03:16:40 -0600

Mac gravatar image

Two thoughts:

  1. You'll have the usual powering-the-Kinect problem. Just a USB port isn't enough; see the Create <-> Kinect Tutorial for details on how to build a power supply in a particular case.
  2. The Kinect (both the OpenNI and libfreenect versions) are in C[++], not Java. I don't know if user processes on Android have to be in Java, but just having ROSJava doesn't get you Kinect support out of the box.
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I also do not believe that anyone has successfully demonstrated the USB Host interface is capable of handling the data rate produced by the Kinect.
tfoote gravatar image tfoote  ( 2011-05-23 05:49:22 -0600 )edit
A related datapoint: a while back, I tried using a Kinect on embedded computer with a single-core 1.2GHz ARM processor. That machine had a hard time keeping up with the data from the Kinect. I summarized my experience (including source for a stripped down Kinect node) [here](https://code.ros.org/lurker/message/20110314.202103.b1c1acba.en.html).
Brian Gerkey gravatar image Brian Gerkey  ( 2011-05-25 04:47:19 -0600 )edit
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answered 2011-05-23 05:01:54 -0600

drcross gravatar image

If the support for ROSJava is limited at the moment, for the purposes of getting an Android phone up and running quickly with a Kinect, is there an immediate disadvantage in using a rooted Android phone with an install of Ubuntu (and then ROS), as opposed to RosJava?

Would the rooted phone with an arm version of ubuntu give me the support to run the Kinect?

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Please use the comment function to reply to answers, not posting another answer.
tfoote gravatar image tfoote  ( 2011-05-23 05:55:59 -0600 )edit
rosjava provides the bindings for java to allow communication with ROS, it does not mean that all libraries have been rewritten in java. ROS is a multi language system and libraries are usually only in one language and then communicate over ROS with programs written in other languages.
tfoote gravatar image tfoote  ( 2011-05-23 05:57:39 -0600 )edit

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Asked: 2011-05-22 08:41:00 -0600

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Last updated: May 23 '11