openni2_tracker

openni2_tracker is a ROS Wrapper for the OpenNI2 and NiTE2 Skeleton Tracker. This is designed as a companion package to the openni2_camera package (found here). Currently, all this node does is publish TF frames of the current tracked user's joint locations. I will eventually be adding a user message similar to the old openni_tracker ROS package.

** Note: These instructions only been tested with the Primesense Carmine 1.08 tracker. There is a way to get this working with the Kinect, using the freenect drivers, but I have not tested that yet. There is information here on how to use freenect with OpenNI2.

Installation

1. Clone the beta OpenNI2 repository from Github:

   git clone git@github.com:OpenNI/OpenNI2.git

   Then, switch to the OpenNI2 directory and build:

   cd OpenNI2
   make

2. Install Nite2 from the OpenNI Website here. Be sure to match the version (x86 or x64) with the version of OpenNI2 you installed above. You will probably need to create a free account.

   Change directories to the NiTE location and install with

   cd NiTE-Linux-x64-2.2
   sudo ./install.sh

   Try and run one of the examples in .../NiTE-Linux-x64-2.2/Samples/Bin/NiTE2. If these don't work, then something went wrong with your installation.

3. Clone openni2_tracker to your ROS workspace.

   git clone git@github.com:futureneer/openni2-tracker.git

4. Configure CMake In the CMakeLists.txt file inside the openni2_tracker package, you will need to change the path where CMake will look for OpenNI2 and NiTE2. These two lines:

   set(OPENNI2_DIR ~/dev/OpenNI2)
   set(NITE2_DIR ~/dev/NiTE-Linux-x64-2.2/)

   need to point to the root directories of where you extracted or cloned OpenNI2 and NiTE2.

5. Make openni2_tracker

   roscd openni2_tracker
   rosmake

6. Set up NiTE2: Right now, NiTE requires that any executables point to a training sample directory at .../NiTE-Linux-x64-2.2/Samples/Bin/NiTE2. If you run the NiTE sample code, this works fine because those examples are in that same directory. However, to be able to roslaunch or rosrun openni2_tracker from any current directory, I have created a workaround script setup_nite.bash. This script creates a symbolic link of the NiTE2 directory in your .ros directory (the default working directory for roslaunch / rosrun). You will need to modify this file so that it points to YOUR NiTE2 and .ros locations. I would be pleased if anyone has a better solution to this.

7. Run openni2_tracker

   roslaunch openni2_tracker tracker.launch

   In the lauch file, you can rename both the tracker name and the tracker's relative frame. I have included a static publisher that aligns the tracker frame to the world frame, approximately 1.25m off the floor.

   <!-- openni2_tracker Launch File -->
   <launch>
   
     <arg name="tracker_name" default="tracker" />
     
     <node name="tracker" output="screen" pkg="openni2_tracker" type="tracker" >
       <param name="tf_prefix" value="$(arg tracker_name)" />
       <param name="relative_frame" value="/$(arg tracker_name)_depth_frame" />
     </node>
   
     <!-- TF Static Transforms to World -->
     <node pkg="tf" type="static_transform_publisher" name="world_to_tracker" args=" 0 0 1.25 1.5707 0 1.7707  /world /$(arg tracker_name)_depth_frame 100"/> 
   
   </launch>

   Currently, this node will broadcast TF frames of the joints of any user being tracked by the tracker. The frame names are based on the tracker name, currently /tracker/user_x/joint_name

THANKS!

Please let me know if something doesnt work, or if you have suggestions (or feel free to add stuff and send a pull request).