Hardware Requirements ROS + Intel Realsense Depth Camera

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As mentioned above it completely depends on what you want to do with the data. There's very little overhead if you do nothing with the data. If you setup a large pipeline with many different sections which interact and requires copying of the data by requiring multiple write access copies to the image data at frame rate you will need a lot more resources. ROS is a tool that can do what you ask it to do. We can't estimate what resources it will take unless you can provide a description of what you actually want it to do for you. And since providing this description is hard to do accurately most people test on representative systems and try to extrapolate.

From my experience, and from the answer above, on a well designed system the majority of the computatonal time will be spent in your actual computer vision ...(more)

Personally having used a Realsense D435i, I have to say there are other considerations as well. We used an intel celeron x86 based SBC and even then the D435i was outputting so much data via USB3 that it took up one of the 4 cores available on the SBC. Mind you, this SBC was supposed to handle autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance, object recognition, path planning, etc, and just publishing realsense data took up almost 1 core (more than 1 core if pointclouds are published). Other people I talked to also mentioned that the D435i driver was unstable due to too much data being pumped, and in the end they used it like a normal RGB camera. If you can afford it, I would highly recommend an intel NUC (i5/i7) as those guys will be able to handle the realsense better. But the nuc has limited port availability, since the ...(more)