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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."

3 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Google by supertrinko · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Google BotView. Little robots roaming the world making 3d models of everything.

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    If it rhymes it must be true.
  2. Less ad money? by TheLink · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Kinect can also be used by advertisers to see how many people are in a room when an ad is on screen,

    That could be bad for those who are getting TV ad money.

    When advertisers can actually measure the number of people walking out and ignoring the ads, they often start paying less for ads :).

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  3. Re:ROS drivers by Missing.Matter · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While the work the MIT student did is noteworthy, it's really quite trivial thanks to ROS. I do robotics research using ROS, and SLAM, navigation, planning, etc. are all handled by ROS automatically as long as you provide the appropriate data streams. It's really as simple as plugging in a device. Even the gesture recognition is handled by the kinect driver and issuing commands from gestures is trivial at that point.

    I think the real recognition should be given to the group at CCNY (no I don't got school there) who did the work of getting the kinect driver working in ROS in the first place, and aren't even mentioned in this article.