Study on the use of Microsoft Kinect for robotics applications

The Microsoft X-Box Kinect Sensor is a revolutionary new depth camera that is used in the gaming industry to capture motions of people and players efficiently using the technology of an RGB camera and infrared camera to differentiate depth. In the Microsoft X-Box, Kinect was used to sense 3D perception of human´s motions. It can also be used for robotic applications, precisely for indoor navigation through the process of reverse engineering. Certain software packages were made available and are open source from “LibFreenect” for Linux machines, Microsoft´s Kinect SDK using the Kinect namespace on Visual Studio 2010 Express (C++, C# or Visual Basic), and Google´s released “Robotic Operating System (ROS)”. In order to claim that this sensor is capable of taking on such a task, we must be able to investigate thoroughly all factors that contribute to this and at the same time we must be able to understand its limitations to be applied and integrated properly with certain types of robots for accomplishing our purpose of achieving successful indoor navigation using proper algorithms. In this paper, the results from testing the Kinect sensor on an autonomous ground vehicle was given.