[hackerspaces] What cool tech are you working on? (was Hackerspaces Manual)

[Yves Quemener]

On 04/06/2011 03:02 AM, Donald J Ankney wrote:
> It's definitely very cool.
> 
> Looking at the Velodyne specs, how does working with a Kinect compare to
> the much higher resolution Velodyne? Considering how cheap an available
> the Kinect is, does it really fill the need that the laser-drive, and I
> assume higher resolution, specialty device?

They are different beasts. The Velodyne does not have a much higher
resolution than the Kinect (in fact it has a lower one in some cases) and
it has a lower refresh rate. What it does have however is a 360° field of
view and a 80 meters range with a purpoted precision of 2 mm (actually it
was more than that in our setting, ~ 1+ cm but maybe it was calibration
being a bitch)

I think that a lot of things can be done with the kinect, but not the
primary mission of the Velodyne : provide a good sensor for automated cars
driving at 50 km/h (30 mph). I heard the new version of the Velodyne is
quite good and half the price of the 64-E, but that is still $30,000.

Note however that Velodyne and kinect are not the only technology to make
Z-cams. Microsoft opened the competition with a very strong product, but I
expect a lot of similar products with different specs in the following years.

> I've been thinking recently that once the Kinect SDK hits, it might be
> an interesting pairing with the Microsoft Robotics Studio.

It's a trap !

I am currentlyusing the open source driver through libfreenect, works like
a charm under Linux, Mac OS and Windows. Do not expect MS's version to be
like that. In particular, do not expect to be able to embed a code using
their kinect driver on anything else than an embeddable version of Windows.

Some people at MS are trying to reproduce the hegemony they manage to form
on PCs in the robotics world.