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Hacked iRobot Uses XBox Kinect To See World
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."
http://www.ros.org/wiki/kinect_node
With the calibration the accuracy of Kinect is much improved.. and ROS has algorithms that can do this automatically for anyone lucky enough to have a manipulator - speaking of which, when is Microsoft coming out with a $150 robotic arm? :)
How we know is more important than what we know.
This. Is. Awesome. I'm really hoping that this becomes a reasonable DIY project...
For it to be of value for that you'd need to give one to everyone (woohoo!) and forbid them from turning it off (doh!).
How we know is more important than what we know.
The movie with Bruce Willis comes to mind...
In my experience, ads being louder and more obnoxious results in muting the TV or tuning to a different channel.