Deterioration of Depth Measurements Due to Interference of Multiple RGB-D Sensors

Depth sensors based on projected structured light have become standard in robotics research. However, when several of these sensors share the same workspace, the measurement quality can deteriorate significantly due to interference of the projected light patterns. We present a comprehensive study of this effect in Kinect and Xtion RGB-D sensors. In particular, our study investigates the effect of measurement failure due to interference. Our experiments show that up to 95% of the depth measurements in the interference image region can disappear when two RGB-D sensors interfere with each other. We determine the severity of interference as a function of relative sensor placement and propose simple guidelines to reduce the impact of sensor interference. We show that these guidelines greatly increase the robustness of RGB-D-based SLAM.