Is it just me, or are hackers and modders doing far more interesting things with Kinect than anybody who’s actually signed a dev contract with Microsoft? I mean, I don’t know about any of you, but I think a Kinect-powered autonomous flying machine is way better than a stupid pet pretend-tiger.
Berkeley’s Hybrid Systems Labs’ quadrotor has been around for a while already, but it just got a totally video game-style upgrade with Kinect – now it can see where it’s going. Next stop, live target acquisition. Next stop, Judgement Day.
“The attached Microsoft Kinect delivers a point cloud to the onboard computer via the ROS Kinect driver, which uses the OpenKinect/Freenect project’s driver for hardware access. A sample consensus algorithm fits a planar model to the points on the floor, and this planar model is fed into the controller as the sensed altitude. All processing is done on the on-board 1.6 GHz Intel Atom based computer, running Linux (Ubuntu 10.04),” writes project researcher Patrick Bouffard. “A VICON motion capture system is used to provide the other necessary degrees of freedom (lateral and yaw) and acts as a safety backup to the Kinect altitude–in case of a dropout in the altitude reading from the Kinect data, the VICON based reading is used instead. In this video however, the safety backup was not needed.”
Or, in regular-speak, Kinect is hooked up to some bits of a netbook running Linux to provide and process visual data about the environment, and – SHAZAM! – autonomous navigation.
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