Kinect is going places. No matter what, One of the biggest innovation from Microsoft is it’s motion detection device, Kinect. We’ve seen a lot of Kinect related hacks in the past. It’s true potential is unleashed by various hackers, and Microsoft seems to be encouraging it lately unlike Sony and Apple.
Ryan Lloyd, Sandeep Dhull and Ruben D’Sa are from Center for Distributed Robotics, University of Minnesota. They’ve come up with an innovation, which I think would go to places. Ranging from Doctors to Military.
These three men are using Microsoft Kinect’s potential, to control advanced robotic arms. This is definitely not simple as we think.
They use OpenNI with PrimeSense to track the skeletal movements initially. Once they succeeded in doing that, they went on to map it to a robotic arm. The program and setup is in such a way that the robot detects shoulder, elbow, wrist and also the status of user’s hand for accurate actuation.
The video below explains the complete system. The team says that they are working on it and would bring up a better system in near future. I’ve contacted them with some feedback and thoughts which I had in mind. Let’s see how they work on them! 🙂
[Source: Embedded Zone]