ZMP designs a Kinect-controlled robot car

Japanese robotics firm ZMP has shown a new robot car that can be controlled by Microsoft Xbox 360 console’s controller Kinect. The robot dubbed RoBoCar 1/10 Lite & Kinect will be a product with better solutions for research and academic purposes. RoBoCar Lite comes from ZMP after the previous notable releases like e-Nuvo and RoBoCar.

RoboCar 1/10 Lite & Kinect

The new RoBoCar makes difference as it is based on Microsoft Kinect. However, Microsoft Kinect SDK has not been yet approved by Microsoft for commercial use. And so, ZMP will have to wait for some time to begin marketing its Kinect controlled robot car that currently runs on Linux OS.

Under the hood, RoBoCar Lite has an AMD Geode LX800 CPU clocking at 500MHz. A mounted camera and Wi-Fi BGN are other noteworthy features of the robot car. It also embeds OpenNI, PrimeSense’s driver framework for better performance with Kinect. Added with the advanced sensors, the Kinect car will move around it being a huge help in academic and research purposes.

As mentioned above, ZMP RoBoCar Lite will not hit the stores immediately since Microsoft has not allowed the commercial use of Kinect for Windows SDK beta. Moreover, ZMP admits that its product does not meet the operating terms of the Microsoft Windows SDK. It is mainly because the hardware does not support ‘Kinect Services for Robotics Developer Studio’ that Microsoft recently released.

Because of these reasons, ZMP is in efforts to develop its RoBoCar Lite as a full-fledged robot car on MS Windows 7. ZMP has plans to sell the robot car for separate prices for academic and business purposes. It will be respectively priced at ¥598,000 (approx $7,636) and ¥698,000, ZMP said.

Via: TechOn