Kinect-Controlled Humanoid Robot – Bring On The Robo-Gladiators!


Seriously, how long will it take before we have Robot Jox happening for real? Except in real life the robots will be tele-operated by guys with Kinects. Seriously. This will happen. Watch this video and tell me it won’t.

This robot is called the Veltrobot, and is gyro-stabilized and has a significant amount of limb freedom. Engineer Taylor Veltrop created a system for controlling it by mapping Kinect output onto a skeletal frame with certain limitations, and then firing that information off to the robot. As you can see, it works quite well.

It’s really blowing my mind how much stuff is being done with the Kinect. I mean, I was pumped for it, but I was also pumped for the Move, and thought the latter would have some cool hacks too. But a few months later, the Kinect is far and away the hackers’ favorite. Just think, if this guy can put this together in a month, what can a team of engineers do in six?

[via Fast Company]