Alternative 3D Sensor Setup

By default, the turtlebot indigo software is configured to work with the Asus Xtion Pro. If you have a Kinect, Realsense, or Orbbec Astra camera and it has not been configured to work for you by your distributor, then you'll need to follow the instructions below.

These instructions ensure the correct robot description details and drivers are loaded (as of indigo, Kinect and Asus require different drivers) as well as ensuring the appropriate roslaunchers are called at runtime.

For Kinect, you have to firstly install the openNI SDK and Kinect Sensor module on Ubuntu and make sure your kinect can work properly on ubuntu. Follow the installation steps in this blog for set up Kinect on Ubuntu with openNI.

For Realsense cameras, see the documentation for instructions to set up your camera.

Configuration

The instructions differ depending on whether you have a prepared usb derived release, from debs, or from source.

Deb Installation

Export the following variable before you source setup.bash.

> export TURTLEBOT_3D_SENSOR=<sensor_name>

Replace "<sensor_name>" above with the appropriate value: "kinect", "r200", or "astra".

For convenience, you may want to append this to your ~/.bashrc or your workspace's setup.sh.

Source Installation

> echo "export TURTLEBOT_3D_SENSOR=<sensor_name>" >> ~/turtlebot/devel/setup.sh
> source ~/turtlebot/devel/setup.bash

Replace "<sensor_name>" above with the appropriate value: "kinect", "r200", or "astra".

Notes

Note: you can see exactly how this is working in turtlebot_bringup/launch/minimal.launch.