Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics

For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. Roboticists have developed tools to accomplish this task, known as simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM. But the sensors required to build that map have traditionally been either expensive and bulky or cheap and inaccurate. On November 4, a solution was discovered—in a videogame. Thats the day Microsoft released the Kinect for Xbox 360, a $150 add-on that allows players to direct the action in a game simply by moving their bodies. Most of the world focused on the controller-free interface, but roboticists saw something else entirely: an affordable, lightweight camera that could capture 3-D images in real time. Within weeks of the devices release, YouTube was filled with videos of Kinect-enabled robots. A group from UC Berkeley strapped a Kinect to a quadrotor—a small helicopter with four propellers—enabling it to fly autonomously around a room. A couple of students at the University of Bundeswehr Munich attached a Kinect to a robotic car and sent it through an obstacle course.

Comments (0)

This post does not have any comments. Be the first to leave a comment below.


Post A Comment

You must be logged in before you can post a comment. Login now.

Featured Product

FAULHABER MICROMO - Impressive accuracy through the latest chip technology

FAULHABER MICROMO - Impressive accuracy through the latest chip technology

With the launch of the IEP3, FAULHABER expands its product line with an incremental encoder which, thanks to the latest chip technology, achieves a very high resolution and accuracy. With a diameter of just 8 mm, the IEP3 is very lightweight and compact yet still offers a resolution of up to 10,000 lines per revolution - made possible by the latest chip technology with high interpolation. In the standard version, the resolution is freely programmable from 1 - 4,096 lines per revolution. Moreover, the chip technology that is used ensures a high positional accuracy of typically 0.3 °m as well as a high repeatability of typically 0.05 °m thanks to accuracy compensation.