Kinectbot

The folks at the MIT personal robotics group didn't waste any time getting the Kinect depth camera working with a mobile robot, with this only approximately a week after the sensor was hacked.



Achieving good spatial awareness has been a fundamental obstacle for robotics, and in the foreseeable future this could be a solved problem. Whilst experimenting with humanoids, such as the Rodney robot, it became obvious to me that unless the robot has a good level of awareness of the shape of it's surroundings then its intelligence and range of skills remains highly constrained. Once 3D information is available then detecting large objects such as people, walls, doors, chairs and desks becomes a far easier proposition than is the case with 2D vision.

This is also a demonstration of the power of building upon earlier work, using existing open source algorithms wherever possible. A big problem in the past was that robotics software would usually be re-invented from scratch, with little or no transferability of software from one system to another either due to hardware incompatibilities or because the software was regarded as being secret or only released under restrictive licences. Being able to get a rapid result such as the above means using software components, such as the SLAM algorithms, which themselves will have taken many years to research and develop.