We just recieved one of the new Intel R200 depth sensors.

It came in a nice little box like this. The sensor is supported on Windows, Android, and there is code for ROS integration available as well.

The big thing that struck me about it so far, though: it’s way smaller than I was expecting. It actually compares favorably to the Primesense Carmine we have been using, as opposed to the bulky Kinect for Xbox One.

Anyway, you need to download the Intel RealSense SDK from Intel in order to use it on Windows. That comes packaged with a bunch of different example programs, including computer vision classics like face detection and object tracking. The one I am most interested in is object scanning. The scan UI is a bit better than the Kinect for Xbox One UI:

We want to be able to scan in our tools for the CoSTAR project, and honestly this looks like a promising way to do it:

We’ll have to keep tweaking the parameters to figure out the best way to get this working.