MIT Drone Finds Its Way Using Kinect Vision

garymortimer writes "This MIT multicopter is able to fly in GPS denied environments by creating a 3D map of its surroundings on the fly (no pun intended) based on point clouds generated by a Kinect. Also pretty handy for avoiding trees and other obstacles outside at low level. This processing is onboard, unlike other systems that depend on motion capture rigs."

Comments

Re:So why didn't Kinect and Wii come from MIT?

[Colonel Korn]

Here's a question: All these university researchers are using Wii controllers and Kinect devices to do research. How come they didn't invent this stuff themselves?

They did, long ago. This sort of thing is usually developed as a demonstrated concept in an academic lab. Proof of concept devices are ungainly, expensive, and incomplete, but they show that the academics' idea works and has potential for further development. Then companies take that public domain knowledge and make products from it. These are much cheaper and better packaged. Now the products are part of our technology culture, so they're natural tools for the next round of academics to use as tools for further innovation.

Is it because they couldn't think in mass-market terms so their solutions were overly complex and expensive?

Now here's another question: Why don't Nintendo and Microsoft make developers kits for their devices sans game console? Or even better, make the open source (I can dream)?

Microsoft is releasing Kinect for PC with an SDK supposedly intended to enable this sort of development. They chose to leave the output from the existing Kinect interface unencrypted, too, resulting in the already large homebrew scene demonstrated in storied like this.