Most Likely The Most Intuitive Kinect Hack We’ve Seen
Seriously, we have seen tons of Kinect hacks to date, but this latest one has taken the cake.
Which, by the way, is not a lie.
Instead of hooking the Kinect up to play games, this peripheral is sending visual data ti a Linux box onbard a mini-helicopter, letting the quadrator fly autonomously, detect its own altitude, and avoid obstacles. A back-up motion camera device feeds other data such as lateral and yaw, and it provides a safety back up for the unit’s altitude detection should Kinect fail at any point during the flight.
This Kinect-powered pelican drone is the work of the STARMAC Project in the Hybrid Systems Lab at UC Berkeley, and the people therein explain just how this unit is made at researcher Patrick Bouffard’s YouTube channel. Take a look at the demo video below.
