Step 1: Moving the Kinect Motor

The first step for my project is to get the Kinect Motor to tilt so that it is possible to take point clouds of an environment from different angles. Unfortunately, this is not possible using the Point Cloud Library and through a series of tests, it is also not very effective using the implementation provided by OpenNI in the Linux environment. Based on this observations, I have turn to a older C++ library called libfreenect developed by the OpenKinect community. With this library, I was able to create a C++ class called KinectMotor.h. For the purpose of my project, this class will deal with any adjustments needed to the hardware components of the Kinect such as moving and tilting the Kinect angle and changing the LED light on the Kinect.

Based on some experimentations, I have come to find out that the Kinect can only tilt between -31 and 31 degrees, with 0 as the reset angle. I should conduct some timing on the code to see how long it takes for the commands to take over the Kinect and move the device accordingly.

Next, I need to combine the C++ libraries OpenNI and libfreenect in the same program, as I will need the libfreenect library to move the Kinect to the appropriate angle and the OpenNI library to save the point clouds to a file to be processed later.