PREAMBLE

This release of RGBDSLAM succeeds our entry at the ROS 3D contest
(see http://www.ros.org/wiki/openni/Contests/ROS%203D). 

There have been many changes, mainly
- Performance improvments w.r.t accuracy and robustness of registration
- Performance improvments w.r.t computation time
- A more convenient user interface with internal visualization
- Convenience features, e.g., saving to pcd/ply file, node deletion and many more


INSTALLATION

The following instructions assume you have ROS Diamondback installed in the
Desktop-Full configuration.  Otherwise please refer to
http://www.ros.org/wiki/ROS/Installation for instructions how to install ROS.
RGBDSLAM has been developed and tested on Ubuntu only.


Install openni-kinect. On ubuntu use the package manager: 
$ sudo aptitude install ros-diamondback-openni-kinect

Checkout hogman_minimal somewhere in your $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH:
$ svn co http://alufr-ros-pkg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/freiburg_tools/hogman_minimal

Checkout the RGBDSLAM source code somewhere in your $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH
$ svn co https://svn.openslam.org/data/svn/rgbdslam/trunk rgbdslam

Compile rgbdslam and dependencies: 
$ rosmake --rosdep-install rgbdslam

Optionally, you might want to install perception_pcl_addons (debian package:
ros-diamondback-perception-pcl-addons) which includes pcd_viewer, a viewer for
the file format used by RGBDSLAM to store registered point clouds. If you
want to process the point cloud you can save to a ply file and use meshlab 
(debian-package: meshlab).


USAGE

To start RGBDSLAM launch
  roslaunch rgbdslam kinect+rgbdslam.launch

Alternatively you can start the openni nodes and RGBDSLAM separately, e.g.:
  roslaunch openni_camera openni_node.launch 
  rosrun rgbdslam rgbdslam

To capture models either press space to start recording a continuous stream
or press enter to record a single frame. To reduce data redundancy, sequential
frames from (almost) the same position are not included in the final model.
The 3D visualization always shows the globally optimized model. Neighbouring
points are triangulated except at missing values and depth jumps.


FURTHER HELP 

Here are some known issues:
1. If you have issues compiling, make sure you removed any older version 
   of RGBDSLAM from your $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH 
2. RGBDSLAM needs Diamondback. Make sure that neither your $PATH nor 
   $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH contains "boxturtle", "cturtle" or "unstable".
3. If you are located in Germany and get errors loading the saved ply files 
   into meshlab, try switching to U.S. locale or replace the decimal point with
   a comma in your .ply file
4. To speed up compile times consider to use "export ROS_PARALLEL_JOBS=-j<#cpus>"
   before rosmake, but you should have lots of memory as gcc may take up to
   2GB for four parallel jobs.

If you have questions regarding installation or usage of RGBDSLAM please refer
to http://answers.ros.org/questions/?tags=RGBDSLAM
For further questions, suggestions or to submit patches, please contact
Felix Endres ([email protected])

Apart from this manual, detailed code documentation can be created using
rosdoc ("rosrun rosdoc rosdoc rgbdslam"), which will create a "doc" folder
in your current directory.


EXPERIMENTAL FEATURES

The following features can be activated in CMakeLists.txt, but are highly
experimental and therefore neither guaranteed to work nor supported in case 
they do not.

  SIFTGPU:
  SiftGPU uses (in our case) CUDA, which needs a new NVidia GPU (see
  http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_gpus.html).  For installing the development
  drivers and the CUDA SDK you can use the following tutorial:
  http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1625433 (tested on Ubuntu 10.04 x64)

  Additional compiling information can be changed in
  external/siftgpu/linux/makefile.

  GICP
  Generalized ICP can be activated for refining the registration. For more
  information see http://stanford.edu/~avsegal/generalized_icp.html


LICENSE INFORMATION

This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  The authors allow the users to use and modify the
source code for their own research. Any commercial application, redistribution,
etc has to be arranged between users and authors individually.

RGBDSLAM is licenced under GPL v.3.