Kinect driver for Player

Better late than never right?  I've just committed a driver for the Kinect to the Player SVN, based on the libfreenect library from the openkinect project.  I've actually been sitting on this driver for a while, but it looks like the libfreenect API has finally stabilized enough that publishing a driver is warranted.  Features of the driver include

• On the fly resolution adjustment for both the video and depth images
• On the fly control of downsampling/heatmap display output for the depth image
• Accelerometer and Tilt motor support

Pointcloud and LED support are still absent from the driver, patches welcome!

New Player tutorials & Guile driver

Last night I hashed out the Driver Capability and Driver Property stubs on the Player wiki.  They now contain some explanation of what both features are, and some example code to implement both features on the driver and client sides.  Both of these features are quite compelling, and go a long way to help deal with run-time driver configuration using Player.

Another exciting new Player contribution: Paul Osmialowski recently contributed a Guile driver to allow Scheme-like scripting from within a Player driver.  The driver is well-documented, and he was also kind enough to complete a writeup on the wiki.

Kinect working on Fedora

As most of the internet has already heard, there is a very large effort underway to reverse engineer Microsoft's new Kinect for the XBox.  The community quickly assembled around the first working open driver, and spawned a project called OpenKinect on github and Google Groups.

Once I heard that an open (GPLv2+) driver had reached a working state with the Kinect, I immediately went on Amazon and got myself one.  Two days later (love that Amazon Prime) it arrived and I spent the night coding intensely trying to get a driver to work using the Player robot server.  I spent a few hours looking over the example code provided by OpenKinect and porting it into a Player driver that serves the data through a Camera interface.  A few hours later, this is the result:

The above is data from both camera sensors: the upper one is from the RGB sensor, and the lower one is the depth image, with a color gradient applied (hot colors are closer, cool colors are farther.)  The Player server collecting, parsing, and publishing the data to the network, and the PlayerCam application subscribes to the server and displays the broadcast information.

This project still has a long way to go: as of yet the OpenKinect project has yet to integrate the PTZ controls, audio streaming, LED control, and accelerometer readings into a single library.  The Robotics SIG is following OpenKinect closely, and once OpenKinect is ready we'd like to include it in Fedora, with a working implementation via the Player package.