Aug.30, 2012

Kinect@Home, a new project launched by robotics researchers at the CAS Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, asks people in the world to scan things around them and upload the scan to the Kinect@Home database.

Kinect@Home is hoping that people with Kinect at home join the project, and they will then use the 3D scans to teach robots how to navigate environments and manipulate objects.

Let's say that we want to teach a robot to open a refrigerator. To do that, a robot first has to recognize a refrigerator, but there are all kinds of different refrigerators and we have no idea what particular sort our robot is going to be asked to deal with. With a Kinect@Home dataset, it might be possible to go check out models of thousands of refrigerators in people's homes, and use those models to teach our robot how to locate (and even open) a generalized fridge.

"If you can get real-world 3-D data for 5,000 refrigerators, you can develop an algorithm to generalize a refrigerator and then test a robot's ability to generalize them," said Aydemir, creator of Kinect@Home project.

This action could help robots to learn the environment and recognize and interact with objects. These helper robots could in the near future offer help for older people or patients.

To join the project people need to download some drivers and a plug-in from the Kinect@Home website. Then run the plugin, and move the Kinect around the object or people. The data gets uploaded and rendered in the cloud. In return user will have access to their 3D models that they can download and embed in any website. Wired made a detailed test of installing and scanning using Kinect@Home here, check it out.

View the example of a 3D model of a living room built and embedded using Kinect@Home:

"Our vision is making and sharing 3D models of the real world as easy as making a Youtube video while helping science. " says Kinect@Home.

 

Source: Kinect@home via spectrum.ieee.org

 

Posted in 3D Scanning

 

 

 

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