Pi-Top ability to use Kinect DK and other SDKs

#1

Hi, never worked with a pi-top or the associated robotics kit before but I’m considering getting one for a project. Wanted to ask a few questions first though. Would anyone be able to tell me:

  1. Can you use the Kinect DK on the pi-top to replace the normal camera or is there some kind of hardware issue with that?

  2. Can you load other SDKs like the Azure SDK and Kinect SDK?

For reference I’m trying to build a campus guide robot that’s connected to Azure so that I can use the speech and sight utilities. The final product would be a small independently moving robot that would be able to answer questions that guests ask, recognize landmarks to provide information on them, and move without assistance safely e.g. recognizing walk/don’t walk at a crosswalk or avoiding an obstruction or person who is in its path.

Thanks ahead of time for any help you can provide.

#2

simple answer is no, not at this time, depth camera is not supported on ARM Debian Package for Raspberry Pi · Issue #656 · microsoft/Azure-Kinect-Sensor-SDK · GitHub

BUT its is possible as I have it working on an NVIDIA Xavier NX but was difficult and buggy so i have no write up for it

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#3

Ah, I see. Thanks. Could I mount a secondary module that can interface with the Kinect and send information to the Pi-Top for C&C? Is the robotics kit’s hardware capable of supporting a setup like that wrt power supply and weight?

#4

I have no idea, i am currently in testing with a lot of stuff but ultimately using something way more powerful than a Raspberry Pi to do vision compute stuff. will be using an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier but may be getting a free upgrade to the new Jetson AGX Orin. It runs on Ubuntu but on ARM, things are rather different and more capable of handling depth and RGB simultaneously

If i can, i will try getting to run smoothly on Raspberry Pi but it would be very difficult and not guaranteed as its out of the project brief

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#5

Yeah, I’m thinking of trying an ESP32 since I’ve got one and I know it can connect/work with the camera. Then it’s a matter of setting up mqtt to communicate between the esp32 and the pi-top. Not sure if it will work though since I haven’t had access to a pi-top to work with before.

#6

if it works with raspberry pi it will work with pi-top