Posted on 07/13/2011 5:49:57 AM PDT by 1010RD
For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it.
SNIP
On November 4, a solution was discoveredin a videogame. Thats the day Microsoft released the Kinect for Xbox 360, a $150 add-on that allows players to direct the action in a game simply by moving their bodies. Most of the world focused on the controller-free interface, but roboticists saw something else entirely: an affordable, lightweight camera that could capture 3-D images in real time.
Within weeks of the devices release, YouTube was filled with videos of Kinect-enabled robots. A group from UC Berkeley strapped a Kinect to a quadrotora small helicopter with four propellersenabling it to fly autonomously around a room. A couple of students at the University of Bundeswehr Munich attached a Kinect to a robotic car and sent it through an obstacle course. And a team from the University of Warwick in the UK built a robot that had the potential to navigate around post-earthquake rubble and search for trapped victims. When something is that cheap, it opens up all sorts of possibilities, says Ken Conley of Willow Garage, which sells a $500 open source robotics kit that incorporates the Kinect. (The previous non-Kinect version cost $280,000.) Now its in the hands of just about anybody.
Robot freaks werent the only people to explore the Kinects possibilities. Researchers, visual artists, and pornographers have all begun cobbling together home-brewed Kinect projects and posting the results online...
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.makezine.com ...
bookmark for later
pornographers?
Laz... where are you? more hitting material
I’d support some taxes for NASA if they could leverage this kind of private efforts. They should send 100 robots to Mars, based on a domestic private competition.
A device that sees in 3D?? Prolly, yeah.
With the current administration, NASA probably couldn’t get a spitwad across their main office front lobby. (Unless a couple of imams said it was okay, anyway.)
Rockets?
Mars?
What comic book are you reading?
(I did some work on the Shuttle back in the 70’s, and I’m so PO’d right now about what’s happened to the whole program I don’t even want to post any more about it.......)
I've never worked in the Space Program, but I've been a supporter all my life. What the Democrats have done to our space effort is unconscionalble. Thank you for your efforts.
Thanks for the ping
Cool. Other uses: radiation worker or mechanical terrorists... Two sided coin...
We all love to bash Microsoft, but here is one place where they did it right. The Kinect is a great piece of equipment, and we’re only beginning to see the uses for it.
What’s most exciting to me is that this is a game changer as to the nature of the marketplace.
We are witnessing not just an innovation along a single product line - the Kinect, but a paradigm shift across the American marketplace. It is hyper-leveraged innovation.
Microsoft on its own, with hundreds of really, really smart people, would never have been able to iterate all the diverse solutions found so far. That’s what free markets do - find solutions.
So you have a nexus of several factors - low price, semi-open source, and vast/broad market penetration. The industry will follow as will other industries. Smith was right - the Invisible Hand beats all and it’s happening right before our eyes.
Correct and true for every innovation there is a nefarious or diabolical use. I think, though, that the good outweighs the bad otherwise we wouldn't continue on this path. The reality is that guns or even just gunpowder have saved more lives than they killed.
I don’t. I’d read or heard recently that NASA spent $200 million per person sent into space over the course of its existence. No real innovation came out of the space program. I think DARPAs got it right, if you ‘were’ going to let government try to innovate.
Set up some prize money and let every tinkerer go for it. The private capitalists who have gone after space flight have done more, faster and for less than NASA ever has.
Awesome and thanks for sharing. I’ve had all my kids read this.
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