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The kinect is powered by an external 12V power supply, so turning it completely off from software will probably require special hardware. There may be ways to reduce the Kienct's power consumption without turning it completely off.

There are a few steps that I would take if I was investigating this:

• Measure the power consumption of your system, without the kinect plugged in. This gives you a baseline "zero" to compare future results against.
• Plug in the kinect, and measure the power consumption without the ROS drivers running.
• Run the ROS drivers, and measure the power consumption. I suspect most of the power draw associated with the kinect is actually associated with streaming data from it and processing that data.
• Start up the rest of your ROS nodes, and measure the increased power consumption associated with running your algorithms. (I suspect this is significant).

Now look at all of your power measurements, compute (or measure) their affect on your battery life, and figure out which steps actually cause the system to use more power.

I suspect the big power consumers in your system are actually the kinect drivers and the algorithms, and that you can significantly reduce your power consumption just by stopping those nodes when you're not using them. The capabilites package may be useful for implementing this.