Tweet
Phillip Roebbel, a student at MIT’s Personal Robotics Group, has used a hacked Xbox Kinect camera and an iRobot Create kit to make a Roomba-esque KinectBot that can recognize human beings and respond to their gestural commands.
In an interview with SingularityHub, Roebbel discussed about how KinectBot grew out of his research in creating robots to locate trapped or missing people in a disaster. The Kinect’s ability to do 3-D mapping of terrain and recognize and respond to human gestures could eventually work in tandem with aerial drones and rapid-response teams to launch rescue operations.
Here’s a video showing how Kinectbot was assembled and what it can do:
Bear in mind, this is just a “weekend hacking project.” Imagine what Microsoft’s Robotics team — who’ve had a lot longer to play with the tech behind Kinect than the rest of us — might be cooking up in their labs.
Still a $150 off-the-shelf sensor like Kinect opens up the option box for everybody. Add the right mix of boops and beeps, a computer hacking interface, jet packs, and the ability to serve drinks and fix starships, and we’re just a few iterations away from a full-fledged R2-D2 unit. We’re living in the future.
See Also:
- How Motion Detection Works in Xbox Kinect
- How Facial Recognition Works in Xbox Kinect
- Alt Text: The Secret Diary of Sentient Kinect
- Kinect Hacks Already Yielding Impressive Results
- Another Kinect hack that's vastly more interesting than the games …
- How Wii and Kinect Hack Into Your Emotions
- Adafruit Offers $1000 Bounty for Open-Source Kinect Drivers …
- Kinect Running on Multiple Platforms, Looking Cool
Powered by WizardRSS | Full Text RSS Feeds
