walt's profile - activity

Try launching the openni node first, then run this command then you should be able to see the options.

When using rgbdslam to generate point clouds of a room interior using a kinect, the camera needs to follow a complex path around the room. Even when doing this, there are significant holes in the resulting model, and many areas are scanned several times. To illustrate the point, a simple helical scan from the center of a room will produce many shadows (holes) in the resulting point cloud, due to the objects in the room.

Getting different viewpoints from around the room is required to get a full point cloud model of the room. In order to fill in these holes, you need to position the camera at various viewpoints to get the missing points in the cloud.

It looks there is a need for a feature or separate tool that would allow for flipping between the individual pcd nodes and selecting one that have neighboring areas with missing coverage, so that IPC can continue on new frames that should be added to the specific region. Without this, the only other option is to pan back through the model to get to the areas where these holes exist. This re-coverage over existing points usually causes distortions in the cloud due to minor miss alignments in registration.

It also seems like assembly of individual PCD nodes that have been saved for later assembly, could be used to build up a complete model, where wholes can be identified and then specific scans are taken to fill these areas. This again brings up the need for another tool, or feature.

Does anyone know of a good example of point clouds that are relativity complete models of interior volumes, that use the kinect?

Walt

The answer here worked for me:

http://answers.ros.org/question/1892/openni_kinect-installation-issues-with

Based on many questions ihere, it looks like there is a problem with the openni driver that makes it not publish reliably. I'm having this same problem.

I'm running ubuntu 11.04 and ros diamondback.

I've tried both installing the driver directly as well as building it from the source as described here: http://www.ros.org/wiki/openni_camera
I have ps-engine and openni-dev packages installed.

When launching: roslaunch openni_camera openni_node.launch

I get something that looks like this:...

SUMMARY
========

PARAMETERS
 * /rosdistro
 * /openni_node1/use_indices
 * /openni_node1/depth_registration
 * /openni_node1/image_time_offset
 * /openni_node1/depth_frame_id
 * /openni_node1/depth_mode
 * /openni_node1/debayering
 * /rosversion
 * /openni_node1/projector_depth_baseline
 * /openni_node1/rgb_frame_id
 * /openni_node1/depth_rgb_translation
 * /openni_node1/depth_time_offset
 * /openni_node1/image_mode
 * /openni_node1/shift_offset
 * /openni_node1/device_id
 * /openni_node1/depth_rgb_rotation

NODES
  /
    openni_node1 (openni_camera/openni_node)
    kinect_base_link (tf/static_transform_publisher)
    kinect_base_link1 (tf/static_transform_publisher)
    kinect_base_link2 (tf/static_transform_publisher)
    kinect_base_link3 (tf/static_transform_publisher)

auto-starting new master
process[master]: started with pid [17226]
ROS_MASTER_URI=http://localhost:11311

setting /run_id to ad069ada-f504-11e0-b3d7-b05ba57903
process[rosout-1]: started with pid [17239]
started core service [/rosout]
process[openni_node1-2]: started with pid [17248]
process[kinect_base_link-3]: started with pid [17252]
process[kinect_base_link1-4]: started with pid [17253]
process[kinect_base_link2-5]: started with pid [17254]
process[kinect_base_link3-6]: started with pid [17260]
[ INFO] [1318446127.209918971]: [/openni_node1] Number devices connected: 1
[ INFO] [1318446127.210083741]: [/openni_node1] 1. device on bus 001:12 is a Xbox NUI Camera (2ae) from Microsoft (45e) with serial id 'B00363247819047B'
[ INFO] [1318446127.211848426]: [/openni_node1] searching for device with index = 1
[ INFO] [1318446127.250457248]: [/openni_node1] Opened 'Xbox NUI Camera' on bus 1:12 with serial number 'B00363247819457B'
[ INFO] [1318446127.259633975]: rgb_frame_id = '/openni_rgb_optical_frame'
[ INFO] [1318446127.260773433]: depth_frame_id = '/openni_depth_optical_frame'

but the red laser never turns on (although the green LED continues to blink when it is plugged into one of my USB 2.0 ports).

Any ideas on what could be the problem? The strange thing is, I've viewed point clouds through rviz recently so I've had it working. I didn't think I've done anything to break it, but not sure what happened. I've seen some others talk about the driver only coming up 1/5 times or 1/10 times, but in my case it isn't coming up at all.

.... If I can get past these driver problems, I would have some interesting point cloud work to start doing!

thanks in advance for any advice,

Walt

I'm trying to:

rosrun dynamic_reconfigure reconfigure_gui

in following the instructions here to configure my kinect: http://www.ros.org/wiki/openni_camera

however, the gui window that comes up is blank?! (no controls or fields, unlike what is shown in the example on the link above). Any idea what could be going on? I'm able to run rviz and have qt4 installed. I'm running on diamondback with ubuntu 11.04.

Thanks, Walt

I'm running into a very similar problem running ros-electric on ubuntu natty (11.04)

Did you determine the solution to this problem?

walt@T5500:~$ sudo apt-get install openni-dev
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
openni-dev is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
4 not fully installed or removed.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
Setting up openni-dev (1.1.0.41~natty) ...
Failed: Failed to write to the file!
dpkg: error processing openni-dev (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 255
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of nite-dev:
 nite-dev depends on openni-dev (>= 1.1.0.41~natty); however:
  Package openni-dev is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing nite-dev (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of ps-engine:
 ps-engine depends on openni-dev (>= 1.1.0.41~natty); however:
  Package openni-dev is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing ps-engine (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of ros-electric-openni-kinect:
 ros-electric-openni-kinect depends on ps-engine; however:
  Package ps-engine is not configured yet.
 ros-electric-openni-kinect depends on nite-dev; however:
  Package nite-dev is not configured yet.
 ros-electric-openni-kinect depends on openni-dev; however:
  Package openni-dev is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing ros-electric-openni-kinect (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfNo apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure.
No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure.
No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already igured
Errors were encountered while processing:
 openni-dev
 nite-dev
 ps-engine
 ros-electric-openni-kinect
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
walt@T5500:~$