So Long Kinect, We Hardly Knew You
GordonMcComb
Posts: 3,366
in Robotics
https://www.cnet.com/news/kinect-is-kaput-as-microsoft-stops-making-it/
News comes out that Microsoft has ended production of Kinect. For gamers this is a bummer once eBay goes through the surplus of used Kinects, but it also has some ramifications for robot builders who use this device -- either with a Windows ROS or hacked into with Linux -- for various motion recognition tasks. We know that a $50 color camera can do about the same thing, but that takes some fairly sophisticated software. What's out there to choose that's as easy to use as the Kinect?
I'm hopeful that the Kinect's demise might spur more open source development of motion recognition using 2D (or even 3D) cameras. Perhaps the latest iterations of lower-cost 180 degree LiDARs can be used in conjunction with optical recognition for motion tracking, depth perception, room mapping, and so on.
News comes out that Microsoft has ended production of Kinect. For gamers this is a bummer once eBay goes through the surplus of used Kinects, but it also has some ramifications for robot builders who use this device -- either with a Windows ROS or hacked into with Linux -- for various motion recognition tasks. We know that a $50 color camera can do about the same thing, but that takes some fairly sophisticated software. What's out there to choose that's as easy to use as the Kinect?
I'm hopeful that the Kinect's demise might spur more open source development of motion recognition using 2D (or even 3D) cameras. Perhaps the latest iterations of lower-cost 180 degree LiDARs can be used in conjunction with optical recognition for motion tracking, depth perception, room mapping, and so on.
Comments
I ended up backing the Scanse Sweep Kickstarter last year, and got one in the mail, but have yet to use it on a bot. I wonder if it can do as good as a Kinect for most robot use? It's a lot smaller, so that's a plus.
What is a "Kinect"?
What does it do that I am missing?
That is, move an arm, and the Kinect creates a skeletal map that registers you've moved your arm. Raise a leg, and Kinect determines you've raised a leg.
When Parallax was involved with the Eddie platform, which used the MS robotics .NET suite, one of the common add-ins was a Kinect. The Kinect attached via USB to a host laptop, and Microsoft-supplied drivers used the Kinect output to register movement and see in 3D space. Other uses could be for mapping, obstacle avoidance, and such.
For more, there's this new Wikipedia thing that explains it well.
Kinect was pretty much all hardware-based, not relying on external software to do the key motion analysis. Drivers read the movement data, but everything was calculated in the device itself. This made it relatively easy to implement, as long as you had drivers for your device. This is as opposed to the "new" approach of one or two video cameras that detect motion in 3D space, where it's entirely done in software. There are open source tools for this, but it's somewhat scattered.
Had to look it up too
I won't miss it, but for sure there will be a lot that will.
Is there a replacement/equivalent?
I was there. And I met Eddie. And as it happens we probably crossed paths.
I've seen the device in action. While I wasn't impressed for its responses, for the game platform, I certainly was impressed in using it for bots such as Eddie.