simulating kinect sensor in Gazebo

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There is a Gazebo BlockLaser plugin which is able to simulate point cloud producing sensors (but there's no RGB value per point available easily AFAIK). See http://www.ros.org/doc/api/gazebo_plugins/html/group__GazeboRosBlockLaser.html. I added such a block laser to a erratic_robot for testing, the working xacro macro I used is here: http://pastebin.com/F5Jamf78 Note that I had to make quite a few changes to how it was used in the API doc to make it work. Also note that it's performance isn't too good, so simulating a 640x480 point cloud or such will probably result in a severe slow down.

Luckily, there's work in progress regarding this topic, for some info see:

http://answers.ros.org/question/715/how-can-i-speed-up-simulation-in-gazebo In the long answer there, Kevin Watts talks about changes to Gazebo for efficiently making depth camera data available.

http://ros-users.122217.n3.nabble.com/Simulating-RGB-D-sensors-in-Gazebo-td2518418.html Basically same topic as this thread, only on the mailing list. There's also a link to the related ticket on trac.