Kinect Revolutionizing Robotics

HizookRobotics writes "The Bilibot Project, an open-source robot platform based on Microsoft's Kinect, was just announced by MIT researcher Garratt Gallagher on Hizook.com. Bilibot is just the first in what will likely be a torrent of robots (both hobbyist and professional) utilizing the Kinect. This sentiment was echoed in an essay by Fred Nikgohar, CEO of RoboDynamics, who believes we've reached a watershed moment in robotics enabled by cheap 3D sensing. While much of the attention for the Kinect has focused on video gaming, perhaps robotics will be its greatest beneficiary."

Re:How is this revolutionary?

[AdmiralXyz]

It's revolutionary because prior to the launch of the Kinect, if you wanted both visual input and a depth map on a robot, you had to spend hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars on LIDAR sensors, which are fussy pieces of equipment at the best of times. Within its design range, Kinect is as accurate as any LIDAR sensor, much more reliable, and waaaaay cheaper. For this reason, a lot of robot designers don't bother with LIDAR, which means you have to estimate distance and range with GPS, direct image data, or a host of other not-quite-as-accurate means. Not to mention it handles skeletal tracking, gesture recognition and other unpleasant programming tasks itself, leaving the robot designer free to do other things.

Kinect really has kind of changed the game overnight. People are very excited about being able to equip accurate depth sensors on all kinds of robots that they wouldn't have bothered with before. Even if no "new" innovations were to ever appear from Kinect, the increase in accuracy of old standbys like manipulator arms will be tremendous now that they can have depth maps. I'm at Cornell at the moment, and many of the grad students in robotics already have Kinect-based projects well underway, and even in the undergrad robot learning classes (where you typically do one semester-long project) the professor is pushing Kinect as an option.