Hacking Kinect onto a mobile robot

MIT roboticist Philipp Robbel hacked a Microsoft Kinect sensor onto an iRobot Create, essentially an open source Roomba without the vacuum. The KinectBot can create its own 3D maps as it moves around a space. The operator can also use natural gestures to direct the robot, like pointing where it should go next.
"Hacked iRobot Uses XBox Kinect to See The World, Obey Your Commands" (Thanks, Sean Ness!)

• [chris23]

  Cool to think of Kinect as a sensing organ for machines…

  • [David Pescovitz]

    Definitely. I like thinking of it as a modular sense organ. Even if that’s not what its, er, creators intended.

• [sando_art]

  very cool…I’m excited to see the other hacks that will come with the Kinect. You know, this is Microsoft’s chance to fully embrace the maker movement and look like a hero…and start revamping their image…

  • [uildaan]

    Yeah, although the best pr coup would have been when that website had a competition to get people to write drivers for it, to have accepted the inevitable and released it themselves and asked for the money to be donated to charity

• [Jellybit]

  Now they just have to use the video to map textures on the 3D reconstruction of the room for the next level of awesomeness:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QrnwoO1-8A

• [deathbaboon]

  This has already been done with OpenCV. The cool this is that this is basically all ready for about the same cost as a camera. I’m interested in how this could affect augmented reality. Also, how about projection mapping? I could see robots learning a path and identifying surfaces to map- potentially creating scenes based on the surface. Hey, I bet you could cloak a vehicle like that…

• [Fang Xianfu]

  This, coupled with this equals something seriously amazing.

• [SuperElectric]

  I wonder what the Hokuyou laser scanner is doing that the Kinect isn’t… It’s either a redundant historical relic, or there’s some limitation to the Kinect that’d be useful to know about.

• [mdh]

  why disable the vacuum? Wouldn’t it be helpful to -see- the dirt?

• [enkiv2]

  Is the noise on the 3d plot due to dead-reckoning navigation or due to the vibrations from the drive motors? The kinect should have a higher resolution than that, especially if it’s also using sonar.

• [shadowfirebird]

  Prediction:

  1) Someone develops this to it’s logical conclusion: finally we have a robot that is genuinely able to sense it’s environment and navigate it. And, open source, no less.

  2) Microsoft tries to make a profit from (1).

• [CuttingOgres]

  Think what this can do for mapping debris and buildings in earthquakes, searching for survivors and ways to reach them!