RealSense r200 poor tracking / loop closure

[jacksonkr]

I've been testing a lot lately with both a kinect v1 and a realsense r200. For whatever reason the r200 struggles to build a map that is even half as crisp as the kinect which is odd because you'd think they would at least be even.

Some specs:

r200
rgb: 1920x1080 @ 30fps
depth: 640x480 @ 60fps
distance: 0.5m - 3.5m

kinect v1
rgb: 640x480 @ 30fps
depth: 320x240 @ 30fps
distance: 0.4m - 4.5m

stats from https://stimulant.com/depth-sensor-shootout-2/

So what's going on here? Is it that rtabmap has been tested/updated a lot more with the kinect? Is it because the Kinect is laser-projector based? Is it an issue with topic support from the r200_nodelet? Regardless, I'm looking to create better support for r200 so I can use it with bots over the kinect (bulky).

EDIT

Thinking on this more I remember Kinect v2 acting similar to, but not as poorly as, the r200. They both use an infrared bulb so I'm thinking that's a big part of the issue.

[jacksonkr]

I've decided that it has to be something to do with the IR. I also found out that the realsense has an infrared auto exposure feature when seems like it will really help. Perhaps that and dumbing image quality down to SD.

I know how to limit the image quality to hd, qhd, and sd from something you wrote online but I'm not sure how to change the auto exposure on the r200_nodelet_rgbd.launch

I know that the parameter is -r200_lr_auto_exposure_enabled which is listed on http://wiki.ros.org/realsense_camera

I tried passing it as a command argument
eg. $ roslaunch realsense r200_nodelet_rgbd.launch r200_lr_auto_exposure_enabled:=1

and also in the launch file as an argument


but neither seemed to work. How can I get the auto exposure to work on the camera? If I can get that going then I'll tweak the settings to find out what works best for indoor vs outdoor.

[matlabbe]

You may set the parameter under nodelet_rgbd.launch.xml file (the auto exposure is not exposed as an argument).

You can also launch rqt_reconfigure and play live with the parameters

$ rosrun rqt_reconfigure rqt_reconfigure

cheers