Could RealSense 3D camera integrated to Robot?

[Wei_W_1]

Hi Comunity,

        I saw a vedio that the realsense 3d camera is integrated to a quadcopter, and make it avoid crash. But there is only the SDK for windows, and the camera has to connect to the computer by USB, I wonder  if there is a way I could  use the camera in my own quadcopter project?

        Thanks very much!

[MartyG]

This video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj-5RNdUz3I

Going by some 'blink and you'll miss them' scenes I grabbed from the start of the video, I would venture that they mounted a mini-PC (it looks like there are too many connectors for it to be an Android board) and at least two of the tablet versions of the RealSense camera to the top of the copter.  The makers of the video were probably alpha testers who had early access to the mobile cam, since Intel was showcasing it at CES 2015 in January.

http://test.sambiglyon.org/sites/default/files/copter.jpg

It's within the realms of possibility that one could mount the desktop camera to a quadcopter with a mini Windows PC running off a battery or stripped-down laptop and battery on top of it, but it'd need quite a bit of lift power to carry the greater weight of the desktop cam.

[Wei_W_1]

Thanks Marty，another question， is there a plan to develop a wireness camera which can be integrated  to robots and the data/vedio can be transported to a PC?

[MartyG]

Transmitting just video over the net isn't so hard.  Cams with a function called IP Camera (such as CCTV cameras) have been doing that for a while.  I don't know if the RealSense cam supports IP Camera transmission.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_camera

If you wanted to transmit the data over the internet from the camera-equipped robot to a PC ... maybe you could put a mini PC on the robot that runs an application built in a game engine like Unity, processing the camera inputs and then sending the results over the internet.  

For instance, if you could access the computer onboard the robot as though it was a web server then you could use your PC's browser to interact live with the program running on the robot's PC via an interface like the Unity Web Player, that lets you play Unity software over the internet in the browser so that you don't have to have the application installed on your PC in order to play it.

That way, you could both see what the robot was doing via a live video feed in the program and maybe steer the robot around and rotate its RealSense camera remotely from your PC.

[Xin_W_1]

http://linuxgizmos.com/linux-based-hexacopter-avoids-obstacles-using-intel-realsense/

The drones in the video look like AscTec fireflies. They are very likely powered by ivy-bridge i7 quad core processor. From different pictures of the Realsense drones it doesn't seem like they use peripheral connections. It would be interesting to see how they did it. Also, notice the drones are running linux but there isn't a linux sdk available from intel yet. But I'm pretty sure they have a team of people worked on the hardwares and drivers to make it work. "The problem of getting the camera work in linux is not getting the data but to interpreted them" as this guy from intel confirmed. http://solsticlipse.com/2015/01/09/intel-real-sense-camera-on-linux.html

If you are interested in robotic I suggest you not to rely on their Windows SDK, because working with an open source platform is so much easier.Here is a guy built a robot with Nvidia jetson tk1 developer kit with a stereo camera as visual input http://myzharbot.robot-home.it/blog/.

Have fun figuring it out