I have now written code to acquire data from the Orbbec Astra depth camera.

My initial experiments were with Orbbecs SDK, and after about 6 hours was getting usable data via the Java API. I posted those details to the orbbec forums.

Alas I moved my code to the Raspberry pi, only to discover there is currently no support for Arm/Linux in the Orbbec SDK.

Next i moved to OpenNI2 and after about 4 more hours, i had usable depth data on the Raspberry pi. I also posted that code to the Orbbec forums.

A nice thing the astra does by default is remove the ground plane which greatly simplifies data processing.

I took the depth data and flattened it buy removing the height data, giving effectively a top down view similar to LIDAR.

The Astra can not give depth data any closer than 60cm, which will really stop me from using it the way i intended. Fortunately i acquired the used Astra cheaply, so i have ordered an Intel Realsense that can give depth data as close as 10cm.