Singelshot from multiple Kinects / synchronize Kinects

Question

Hi there,

I'm trying to build a portable device with a pandaboard and two kinects on it. Because of the fact that the Pandaboard just provide one USB-bus I would like to knows if it's possible to synchronize the sensors in a way that they are interlacing (pictures are alternating) or if I could trigger the Sensor to take a picture ( for the first and then for the second sensor with minimal latency). I just need singleshots (but from both sensors at the same time) after pressing a button, respectively not the full videostream is needed. Is there a way to do that with just one USB-bus?

EDIT: Due to the fact that I'm using an ARM Platform (Pandaboard ES) my computational resources are very limited I will probably use two boards and synchronize the boards system-time with crony. Afterwards I would be able to use message_filters as Mac mentioned it. Unfortunately is my publishing rate pretty bad (1-2 pointclouds per second) so I doubt that this will give me sufficient solution. Is there a way to converge the publishing time of the sensors?

I would be glad about any idea or recommendations.
Cheers

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Originally posted by dinamex on ROS Answers with karma: 447 on 2012-05-30

Post score: 0

Answer 1

So far as I know, doing this with a single USB bus is impossible; one Kinect will completely saturate the bus that it's on.

Also, there isn't (as far as I know), any concept of "triggering" a Kinect. What you'll need to do is set up a node that listens to both Kinects and implements a synchronization routine (see the approximate synchronization stuff in message_filters). This node would also publish a service that your trigger calls, and then saves the most-recent synchronized pair of images to disk, or wherever else you want to put them.

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Originally posted by Mac with karma: 4119 on 2012-08-09

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1