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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."

27 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. ROS drivers by QuantumG · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
    1. 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.

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

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

    --
    If it rhymes it must be true.
    1. Re:Google by datapharmer · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I actually had that exact same idea, but for open street maps. Why not put these things on cars, bikes, etc. to render open source 3d maps?

      --
      Get a web developer
  3. 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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    1. Re:Less ad money? by wvmarle · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The next thing you know is some DRM in your TV that disables the mute function during ads :)

    2. Re:Less ad money? by houghi · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No. What will happen is that ads will become louder and more obnoxious, so people will not be able to ignore them. And as long as it brings in more money then it costs, ads will be there.
      People are so dicile that they think that ads are something we can't live without anymore.

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
    3. Re:Less ad money? by DeionXxX · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This is true for all analog -> digital advertising. Digital advertising is so enticing to brands because they can MEASURE how their ads are actually doing. Are people looking at my ad? Are they interacting with it? How long? Are then then going to my site? Are they buying something? Are they coming back later? Did they invite someone else? Did those people come to our site? Did they buy something? On and on and on...

      Those are all questions we can answer now with digital advertising. You couldn't do that with "analog" ads in print, on TV or Radio.

      So at first companies stopped spending as much, then they realized that their normal ads didn't work, but soon, they started spending much more money on digital because they could maximize their returns now.

      So in this case, advertisers might start buying less ads if they see that people are ignoring them and leaving the room. However, advertisers will soon figure out what works and we'll have ads that are better tailored for the experience and will make people actually watch / interact with them. This happened with TV ads too... once DVR's became popular, advertisers created ads just for DVR's.

    4. Re:Less ad money? by am+2k · · Score: 2, Informative

      In my experience, ads being louder and more obnoxious results in muting the TV or tuning to a different channel.

    5. Re:Less ad money? by GNious · · Score: 3, Funny

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

    6. 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.

  4. Was anyone surprised about the privacy bit? by rsborg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."

    Seriously, this is the first thing I thought when I read aboutthe Kinect. Here is a box, wired to the internet, with a hundred little beams that can not only tell what you're doing, what the room looks like to absurd levels of detail. Talk about 1984-style, in-soviet-russia type monitoring.

    Forget the advertisers, with enough of these things deployed the feds won't need those vans parked outside your house, they'll grab the data in real-time from either the ISP or Mircrosoft.

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    1. Re:Was anyone surprised about the privacy bit? by paganizer · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The first thing I thought about was cheap motion capture / do-it-yourself BVH file generation; I'm a semi-pro animator & cgi guy, and this is sort of a holy grail for the basement computer graphics community.

      I'm pretty sure all a person would need is 2 or more Kinects and some relatively simple code to make something that could compete with systems that cost around $5000. I waste a LOT of money on various software packages, but 5k is pretty much out of the question; an additional Xbox 360 and 2 Kinects, though... There would be a LOT more amateur and low dollar animations made.

      But, after that, yeah, the level of monitoring people would be potentially opening themselves to is pretty amazing, also.

      --
      Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
    2. Re:Was anyone surprised about the privacy bit? by QuantumG · · Score: 2, Insightful

      1. you don't need an xbox 360
      2. trying to use two will interfere with each other..

      See, the way it works is, the unit projects an pattern in the infrared and a camera creates images which are processed to infer depth. That camera is calibrated with the standard color camera so you get full RGB-depth. So if you had two projecting the pattern you wouldn't get good images in the infrared.

      One way to defeat this may be to add a shutter to the projector and synchronize them so one is projecting when the other isn't.. you'd have to synchronize the frame dropping too. Another idea is to add a difference filter over each projector/camera pair.

      There's also the 100% software solution of actually modeling what you see automatically.. so you start with half a human, the human turns around and you get the other half, etc. It'll be mostly accurate.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
    3. Re:Was anyone surprised about the privacy bit? by Xest · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Fortunately there's no law and hence no enforcement preventing you from unplugging your network cable and/or Kinect when it suits to prevent this ever being a problem.

    4. Re:Was anyone surprised about the privacy bit? by AHuxley · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Just like everyone cleans out their cookies, flash cookies and browser database?
      Think of the fun the feds/state task force could have with a new MS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Lantern_(software) for the Kinect.
      Once you are on their list for a warrantless networking sneak and peek, your junk is moving up the tubes.
      The audio, visual and depth to plots or unatural acts on your sofa.

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
  5. Re:biometrics lurk by MrEricSir · · Score: 2, Funny

    Solution: wear sunglasses when you play Kinect games!

    --
    There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
  6. 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.

      --
      What a depressingly stupid machine.
  7. How nice... by GF678 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    An MIT student works out an interesting way to merge Kinetic with existing technologies for the benefit of users.

    vs.

    A Microsoft rep talks about how Kinetic can be used to foster yet more advertising on people ...

    Interesting difference in the application of advanced technology.

    1. Re:How nice... by maeka · · Score: 2, Insightful

      An MIT student works out an interesting way to merge Kinetic with existing technologies for the benefit of users.

      vs.

      A Microsoft rep talks about how Kinetic can be used to foster yet more advertising on people ...

      "I liked the University. They gave us money, they gave us the facilities and we didn't have to produce anything! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results. You've never been out of college. You don't know what it's like out there."

    2. Re:How nice... by vegiVamp · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Both are working for the benefit of their users/customers. You are just misguided about who MS' customers are.

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      What a depressingly stupid machine.
  8. Surrogates by skywatcher2501 · · Score: 2, Informative

    The movie with Bruce Willis comes to mind...

  9. Re:Advertising by mcvos · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There's money in it. And it's not necessarily bad, mind you. I admit Microsoft's suggestion sounds creepily like pretty invasive spying, but I'm toying with ideas to have big screens with advertisements or other messages in some public space, respond to people standing in front of them. Show several items, and zoom in on the one they look or point at, for example. Stop playing a message when the person walks away. Show stuff bigger when they're far away, smaller when they're near. That sort of stuff.

    I'm not usually one for advertising, but the company I work for happens to do a lot of different things, and this sounds like something right up their alley.

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

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

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    Get a web developer
  11. Meta ads by 6Yankee · · Score: 2, Interesting

    OK, so what happens if I point the Kinect at the TV when the ads are on? Will it select ads appropriate for the people in the ads? I'm not sure whether the results would be hilarious or depressing.

  12. Comcast wanted to do this too by anglico · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Didn't Comcast do this last year when the story broke that they were putting cameras into the cable set top boxes? I guess if you add in a videogame interface it becomes more palatable to the masses?
    Link