You've have your Kinect and want to mount it on your robot, but now you're faced with a challenge: you need to precisely determine the mounting point of your Kinect so that it the data from it can be interpreted correctly; e.g. if you want to use it to run autonomous navigation.
The "Automatic Calibration of Extrinsic Parameters" entry from François Pomerleau, Francis Colas and Stéphane Magnenat of the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETHZ makes solving this problem easy for users and does much more. If you run their software with the Kinect mounted, it will output the tf transform between your base_link
and the camera, making configuration easy.
They also released several lower-level libraries to help build other applications on top: libnabo for running fast K Nearest Neighbor, and libpointmatcher, a modular ICP library. These are important for building tracking applications, as shown in the video, as well as building SLAM and other systems.
Leave a comment