Hardware requirement for starters?

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Hi, I think it depends what you want to use the Kinect for and what other sensors you plan to use. If you want on board processing of the point clouds (RGBD etc...) for 3d reconstruction, I think you would need at least an I5-I7 like CPU, a strong GPU (>1G) and SSD (if you want to save more than a few seconds of data on the disk for debugging). If you need it for navigation, basically you need the best PC you can buy.

However, if you only want to read data, and process it somewhere else (or run some light algorithm on it), even an atom dual core can be O.K.

If you're just starting out, you could look at simulating your robot first, as you will hit a lot of the same issues but will be a lot cheaper. Gazebo will allow the solving of a lot of higher level issues and will help you discover: 1. problems with your design, 2. the software configuation you need to support your robot's tasks

Once you know the software configuration, you can start looking at cpu's. My preferences is for the beaglebone, an opensource Armhf device, running ubuntu. I believe its perfect for mobile devices, however because it is different architecture to an x86 machine, pretty much all your ros source code will need to be compiled on the bone as support for cross compiling is a little deficient

Hope this gets you started. And if you need an ROS ubuntu SD card image for beaglebone, let me know, as compiling from source can be a little tricky.

If space is not an issue, I'd start looking at microATX (17x17 cm) with i5 or i7, with at least 4Gb of RAM. Obviously, the more you have, the better. These components are common and you'll find them easily. If space IS an issue, then look for PC104 (9x9 cm) format, or even PicoITX. But this hardware will be more difficult to find, and more expensive.

It's your choice!