A group of Stanford engineering students channeled their love of Star Wars to create a 'JediBot', a Kinect-powered robot that is strong with the force. Check out the video here.
JediBot wields a foam sword (or light saber) which can effectively fight against attack by another foam sword in an epic battle between the powers of good and the forces of evil (insert maniacal laugh, mwahahahahahahahaha).
Kinect hacking has been extremely popular since the device was released last year for the Xbox 360. The Kinect includes several cameras and infrared sensors which allow it to detect moving objects with a great deal of accuracy.
Programmed into the JediBot are a series of attack motions. Under normal conditions, JediBot would only be able to fight if it knew what attack was coming and could plan out its next move. However, thanks to the Reflexxes Motion Libraries developed by Stanford visiting entrepreneur and researcher Torsten Kroeger, JediBot can react to events on-the-fly in less than a millisecond.
While we might not see JediBot's roaming the street anytime soon, the ability for the robot to interact in real time could have a lot of wide ranging implications for the future of robotics.