It seems as though the Kinect is not meant just for gaming purposes while making you sweat, as some of the smarter folks out there have managed to take the Kinect and “re-applied” it to other mechanical lifeforms – such as ZMP Inc. and their “RoboCar 1/10 Lite & Kinect”. This is basically a robot car that will sport the Kinect gesture controller.
Just what kind of role does the Kinect play here? Well, it will occupy the place of a range image sensor, where the robot car is intended to see action as part of research efforts involving autonomous mobile robots at academic institutions and business organizations.
The RoboCar’s main body will sport AMD’s Geode LX800 (operating frequency: 500MHz) processor and Linux as the operating system of choice. As Microsoft didn’t make allowance for the commercial use of “Kinect for Windows SDK beta,” this means ZMP is unable to sell the new robot car with the kit at the moment.