This Kinect hack may well be the best yet: the Personal Robots Group at MIT have taken a battery-powered Kinect and grafted it on to an iRobot Create (the hackable platform from the makers of Roomba and PackRobot). The Kinect helps create a 3D map to help the robot navigate. They’re also planning on giving the Kinect iRobot the ability to identify humans using Kinect smarts. See after the break for the Kinect iRobot in action and more good Kinect robot news…


As well as the Kinect iRobot, the makers of ROS, the open-source robot operating system, are beavering away at a Kinect driver which should mean you can feed all that juicy Kinect data into a robots libraries. With the Kinect, mics, accelerometer and tilt motor, you’ve got a really affordable sensor package for creating a 3D sensing robot pal. Welcome to the future my friends! The Kinect robots are on the rise.

Intrigued by Kinect? Try our Kinect review.

Out now | £129 | Kinect (via Engadget)

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  • http://www.realestateactive.com/ Michael Douglas

    This is a great idea Kinect hack is added on the Robot to make a 3D map for it. I think it is just like how XBOX controller made the only difference for this one is you need to download first the driver hack. I think they should encourage innovations since XBOX controller are almost the same as this one. But we all know that no matter what people do and think of it , it is still profitable for the Microsoft.

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