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Kinect-Enabled Rescue 'Bot Could Help Scan for Earthquake Survivors

by Amar Toor on March 1, 2011 at 08:30 AM

With rescue workers continuing to search for survivors among the rubble from last week's devastating earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, a group of engineers from the U.K. have constructed a robot that could make their jobs a little easier -- thanks to Microsoft's Xbox Kinect. The Kinect's motion-detection sensors can instantly model the robot's surroundings and scan them for survivors, while its 3-D imaging can tell rescue workers how far away any spotted victims may be. "It's not really designed to bring people who are stuck there out," explained mechanical engineer Peter Crook, from Warwick University. "But it would mean that the rescue services know where they are."


Tags: christchurch, earthquake, kinect, Microsoft, NewZealand, rescue, Robots, survivors, top, uk, University of Warwick, UniversityOfWarwick, Warwick Mobile Robotics, WarwickMobileRobotics, xbox

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