Willow Garage, the makers of the PR2 robot have been playing with the Kinect. You might be a little tired of seeing every little new project people are doing with it, but there’s something here we couldn’t help but point out. When we posted the video of the guy doing 3d rendering with the Kinect, many of the commenters were speculating on how to get full environments into the computer. Those of you that said, “just use two, facing each other” seem to have been on to something. You can see that they are doing exactly that in the image above. The blue point cloud is one Kinect, the red cloud another. The Willow Garage crew are using this to do telemetry through the PR2 as well as some gestural controls. You can download the Openkinect stack for the Robot Operating System here. Be sure to check out the video after the break to see the PR2 being controlled via the Kinect as well as some nice demonstrations of how the Kinect is seeing the environment.
[via BotJunkie]
