Hacked iRobot Uses XBox Kinect to See The World, Obey Your Commands
 

Millions are drinking the Kinect Kool-aid, jumping around in front of their XBox and playing games by flailing their bodies. Now a student at MIT’s Personal Robotics Group is going to put all that wild gyrating 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, as you can see in the video below. I had a chance to talk with Robbel and learn more about how this “weekend hacking project” might evolve into some really cool applications for rescuing victims after a disaster.

http://singularityhub.com/2010/11/17...ommands-video/