http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD5toEIT-DU
In the off-season, intrepid programmers from team 488 have been working on some fun Kinect projects. Our primary goal - to have an FRC robot navigate a unknown (and potentially changing) environment with no prior knowledge of that environment.
Our setup/process is as follows:
-Kinect running from the robot power supply
-Kinect plugged into a Laptop running RoboRealm
-Roborealm processes the depth image from the kinect and looks for obstacles
-LabVIEW program running on the cRIO queries the RoboRealm server for obstacles
-LabVIEW program determines the importance of the obstacles, based on their distance angle
-LabVIEW program sums all the forces (including the robot's desire to advance) and advances/turns as necessary to progress
In the future, we want to make a number of improvements:
-Replace the laptop with a small form factor (on-board) computer
-Integrate into a field-oriented system to give the robot higher-level goals (going to a specific point, instead of just advancing)
The Kinect has a lot of potential!