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Hacked iRobot Uses XBox Kinect To See World

Posted by Soulskill on from the gesticulating-at-robots dept.

kkleiner writes "A student at MIT's Personal Robotics Group is going to put Microsoft's Kinect to a good use: controlling robots. Philipp Robbel has hacked together the Kinect 3D sensor with an iRobot Create platform and assembled a battery-powered bot that can see its environment and obey your gestured commands. Tentatively named KinectBot, Robbel's creation can generate some beautifully detailed 3D maps of its surroundings and wirelessly send them to a host computer. KinectBot can also detect nearby humans and track their movements to understand where they want it to go." In related but less agreeable news, "Dennis Durkin, who is both COO and CFO for Microsoft's Xbox group, told investors this week that Kinect can also be used by advertisers to see how many people are in a room when an ad is on screen, and to custom-tailor content based on the people it recognizes."

6 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Re:biometrics lurk by MrEricSir · · Score: 2, Funny

    Solution: wear sunglasses when you play Kinect games!

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    There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
  2. Feature Request #42: by pinkushun · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hand gesture to "make me a sandwich". Wait iRobot says No? Okay, gesture "sudo make me a sandwich" :-)

    1. Re:Feature Request #42: by vegiVamp · · Score: 2, Funny

      Of course. It's way to dangerous to just let anyone in there, what with my woman chained to the sink.

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      What a depressingly stupid machine.
  3. Re:Less ad money? by GNious · · Score: 3, Funny

    Thankfully Disney has prior art on this, with ads on DVDs that cannot be skipped

  4. Re:biometrics lurk by datapharmer · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yeah, they'll use the shape of your ears instead!

    --
    Get a web developer
  5. Re:Less ad money? by MobyDisk · · Score: 2, Funny

    And deploys sofabelts that prevent you from getting up and walking away while it applies glue to hold your eyes open.