How to connect Kinect to Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 with ROS

Today's episode #8 is about using Kinect with ROS on Raspberry Pi 2 or 3. Kinect is one of the most popular source of PointClouds - array of points with 3D coordinates information. It has proprietary connector - actually it's USB+12V bus, and needs adapter for PC connection Despite that Kinect is bigger than ASUS Xtion, it has also tilt motor, microphone array, accelerometer and better support from ROS community PointClouds can be converted to LaserScan - array of range sensor data withing some angle range. It looks like lidar data, but not in 360 degrees. Laserscan information can be used for SLAM - map building, obstacle avoidance, etc... Video transcript can be found here: http://roboticsweekends.blogspot.com/2017/12/how-to-connect-kinect-to-raspberry-pi-2.html Links: Launch file Gist: https://gist.github.com/WinKILLER/7a8f6aa494157f02a633efb3831ad69f Rviz view files: https://gist.github.com/WinKILLER/df1a37f0406e5370abf39534bd8bbde1 Freenect ROS wiki: http://wiki.ros.org/freenect_launch Video transcript: http://roboticsweekends.blogspot.com/2017/12/how-to-connect-kinect-to-raspberry-pi-2.html