Is there anything Kinect can’t do? Robotics students at MIT have equipped the Xbox accessory’s sensor-package to a quadrocopter, creating a highly effective unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).

Students have developed a real-time visual odometry system that can use a Kinect to provide fast and accurate estimates of a vehicle’s 3D trajectory. This system is based on recent advances in visual odometry research, and combines a number of ideas from the state-of-the-art algorithms. It aligns successive camera frames by matching features across images, and uses the Kinect-derived depth estimates to determine the camera’s motion.

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