A Portable, WiFi-enabled Kinect

The builds using a Kinect as a 3D scanner just keep getting better and better. A team of researchers from the University of Bristol have portablized the Kinect by adding a battery, single board Linux computer, and a WiFi adapter. With their Mobile Kinect project, it’s now a snap to automatically map an environment without lugging a laptop around, or just giving your next mobile robot an awesome vision system.

By making the Kinect portable, [Mike] et al made the Microsoft’s 3D imaging device much more capable than its present task of computing the volumetric space of the inside of a cabinet. The Reconstructme project allows the Kinect to be used as a hand-held 3D scanner and Kintinuous can be used to create a 3D model of entire houses, buildings, or caves.

There’s a lot that can be done with a portabalized, WiFi’d Kinect, and hopefully a few builds replicating the team’s work (except for replacing the Gumstix board with a Raspi) will be showing up on HaD shortly.

Video after the break.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfSqHEtljVg&w=470]

21 thoughts on “A Portable, WiFi-enabled Kinect

  1. only thing that bugged me, is that it would have been nice if they rebuilt the case to house the wifi adapter neatly inside. all of the wires tidied away.

    i do respect and appreciate the build but i felt it was a shame to stop at a prototype appearance.

    1. Isn’t the kinetic the worst device for this?

      power hungry (mostly trying to process skeletons and audio input). awful camera (potato quality). ridiculous short range. joke of a precision margin. extremely susceptible to IR interference.

      something with a better camera and a lidar would run laps on this. and i bet not more expensive. Maybe a little harder to source.

  2. hmmm Ok I will upgrade this. I have an extra Pico pc board/system. a 3d printer and a complete machine shop. I think a belt wearable device with video on eyeglasses would be great. and add micro xray etc. and have a complete tricorder lol. at least a reverse engineering system.

  3. OH! I hate when ppl do that, If you have access to a laser cutter why the h*ll woud you make an ugly plywood box? And the camera lenses would look alot cooler if the holes would be cut to match not in a way that you can see all the other parsts and stuff insede too..

  4. Makes you wonder where this sort of tech will lead, police forensics could do with this stuff so the first person to a crime scene could document it in 3D before any ‘contamination’ by investigators.

  5. This would be an ideal project for the Carambola from 8devices. It comes with high speed (150MBit/s) WiFi on board. It’s cheap and could easily handle streaming the data to a host PC for processing (or store it on a USB thumb drive for later processing).

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