Robots in our life

3D SENSING: THE KINECT REVOLUTION CONTINUES

Last year, a curious adornment started appearing on many robots’ heads. It wasKinect, the now-popular Microsoft 3D sensor. Cheap and easy to use, Kinect made 3D mapping and motion sensing accessible, and the robotics community embraced it wholeheartedly (see one example in the photo, below). “People have been searching for a low cost alternative to laser rangefinders, and now we have one (for indoor use, at least),” one of our panelists told us, adding that she expects to see a “surge” in usage. Indeed, the Kinect 2, which may appear sometime this year, will feature higher resolution and frame rate, allowing the device, if you believe the rumors, to read lips. New types of cameras also promise to expand the possibilities of 3D sensing. So-called “computational cameras”—like the Lytro, based on technology developed at Stanford—capture both intensity and angle of light and allow for refocusing already-snapped pictures and the creation of 3D images. This new wave of 3D sensors may not only give robots better “eyes,” but they could also provide an effective way of “3D scanning” everyday objects, generating libraries that robots would access to finally understand this thing we call “the real world.” “3D sensing is already hot,” one of the panelists commented, “but with the Kinect and the next generation of similar cheap sensors, the sky is the limit.”

Microsoft’s Roborazzi robot features a Kinect for navigation and a camera for snapping pictures of people. Photo: Bill Crow/Microsoft