Hacked iRobot Uses XBox Kinect + Roomba (iRobot Create) to See The World, Obey Your Commands (video)

Hacked iRobot Uses XBox Kinect to See The World, Obey Your Commands (video) @ Singularity Hub – thanks Kevin!

Hacked-Kinect-Bot

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.


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5 Comments

  1. wow, that’s litterally like an actual animal you could train with hand signals

  2. how do you power the Kinect? Doesn’t it need a proprietary power connector or can it be powered over usb?

  3. Check out this guy with his xbox kinect hack! real presence 3d projection!!

    http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Kinect/index.html

  4. The real reason Microsoft’s doing sabre rattling over their “secure” device.

    They’re jealous of the cool things we’re doing and envious that they didn’t think of a Kinect enabled Roomba first.

  5. Maybe this will lead to a Roomba that won’t get stuck! 🙂

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