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Unread 29-01-2012, 18:37
sjspry sjspry is offline
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Re: The kinect on the Robot

There's been about three or four threads about this before this one. The consensus is that it is generally a bad idea. In fact, the shoehorning of the Kinect into this year's competition was less than tactful, and as far as I can tell has only succeeded in upsetting people due to its uselessness.

Do you really want to stick it on the robot? Well... Fine, but you probably won't get much more data from it than you would by just using a camera. You already have distance, based on the starting position. Alignment you would get from the normal camera.

You'll need to spend money to do this. In one of the other threads, someone mentioned a USB-ethernet converter/interface. That would probably be the best option, but it was about $125 or so. Another would be the Panda Board, at closer to $200, but you would need to program it, it is an embedded computer.

Teams should stop getting hung up on the idea of using the Kinect as some kind of uber-sensor. The data will simply not help that much. I would keep it for another time and use it in an off-season project.