Interfacing Orbbec Astra with ROS

One of the alternatives to Kinect is Orbbec Astra. There are ROS drivers available for Astra, and we can see how to set up that driver and get the image, depth, and point cloud from this sensor.

Installing the Astra–ROS driver

The complete instructions to set up the Astra-ROS driver in Ubuntu are mentioned at https://github.com/orbbec/ros_astra_camera and http://wiki.ros.org/Sensors/OrbbecAstra. After installing the driver, you can launch it using the following command:

$ roslaunch astra_launch astra.launch

You can also install the Astra driver from the ROS package repository. Here is the command to install those packages:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-astra-camera$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-astra-launch

After installing these packages, you have to set the permission of the device in order to work with the device, as described at http://wiki.ros.org/astra_camera. You can check the ROS topics that are generated from this driver using the rostopic list...