Driver library for the Kinect Version 2 (Xbox One) device.

Author(s): Joshua Blake, Florian Echtler, Christian Kerl

Maintainer(s): Joshua Blake [email protected], Ralf Kaestner [email protected]

License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

Operating system(s): Debian-based Linux

Package PPA: ppa:ethz-asl/drivers

This project provides a driver library for Kinect for Windows v2 (K4W2) devices (release and developer preview).

Note: libfreenect2 does not do anything for either Kinect for Windows v1 or Kinect for Xbox 360 sensors. Use libfreenect1 for those sensors.

This driver supports:

• RGB image transfer
• IR and depth image transfer

Missing features:

• Registration of RGB and depth images
• Audio transfer
• Firmware updates

Watch the OpenKinect wiki at www.openkinect.org and the mailing list at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/openkinect for the latest developments and more information about the K4W2 USB protocol.

If you use this work in an academic context, please cite the following publication:

P. Fankhauser, M. Bloesch, D. Rodriguez, R. Kaestner, M. Hutter, and R. Siegwart, "Kinect v2 for Mobile Robot Navigation: Evaluation and Modeling", in IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR), 2015. (PDF)

@inproceedings{Fankhauser2015KinectV2ForMobileRobotNavigation,
  author = {Fankhauser, Péter and Bloesch, Michael and Rodriguez, Diego and and Kaestner, Ralf and Hutter, Marco and Siegwart, Roland},
  title = {Kinect v2 for Mobile Robot Navigation: Evaluation and Modeling},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR)},
  year = {2015}
}

This project has been forked from the original Kinect v2 device driver published under https://github.com/ethz-asl/libfreenect2 in order to maintain a build system port and some minor feature additions. Please not that this fork is intended to support Debian-based Linux build systems only and will most likely never be extended to other platforms.

Up to now, the build has been verified to work under Ubuntu trusty.

The maintainers of this project provide binary packages for the latest Ubuntu LTS releases and commonly used system architectures. To install these packages, you may follow these instructions:

• Add the backports PPA to your APT sources by issuing

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ethz-asl/backports
  

  on the command line

• Add the project PPA to your APT sources by issuing

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ethz-asl/drivers
  

  on the command line

• To re-synchronize your package index files, run

  sudo apt-get update
  

• Install all project packages and their dependencies through

  sudo apt-get install libfreenect2*
  

  or selected packages using your favorite package management tool

To build from source, this project requires the CMake build system with an open-source macro extension called ReMake.

If you already have installed ReMake on your build system, you may skip this step. Otherwise, before attempting to build this project the traditional CMake way, you must install ReMake following these instructions.

The build dependencies of this project have been backported from more recent releases of Ubuntu or their source code repositories. To install them, follow these instructions:

• Add the backports PPA to your APT sources by issuing

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ethz-asl/backports
  

  on the command line (see synopsis for the project's package PPA)

• To re-synchronize your package index files, run

  sudo apt-get update
  

• Install all build depdencies through

  sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev ocl-icd-libopencl1 opencl-headers libglfw3-dev libglewmx-dev libopencv-dev libturbojpeg libjpeg-turbo8-dev libboost-program-options-dev doxygen pkg-config
  

Once ReMake is available on your build system, you may attempt to build this project the CMake way. Assuming that you have cloned the project sources into PROJECT_DIR, a typical out-of-source build might look like this:

• Create a build directory using

  mkdir -p PROJECT_DIR/build
  

• Switch into the build directoy by

  cd PROJECT_DIR/build
  

• In the build directory, run

  cmake PROJECT_DIR
  

  to configure the build

• If you want to inspect or modify the build configuration, issue

  ccmake PROJECT_DIR
  

• Build the project using

  make
  

• If you intend to install the project, call

  make packages_install
  

  (from packages on Debian-based Linux only) or

  make install
  

• Kinect v2 not connected to a USB-3 port,
• Insufficient user rights on raw USB device (add user to plugdev group).

The K4W2 hardware is currently pre-release. Per the K4W2 developer program agreement, all public demonstrations and code should display this notice:

"This is preliminary software and/or hardware and APIs are preliminary and subject to change."