[Tyler]

Open Lidar Project
     


We're big fans of promoting the adoption of free software for
robotics use so we couldn't pass this story up. William Cox of RobotBox is
offering
a bounty to free software developers and robot hackers who are
willing to reverse engineer the laser rangefinder on Neato Robotics's XV-11.
Inspired by Ladyada's
Kinect bounty, I thought, "hey, why
can't I do that?" So, I'm offering a $200 bounty to the first person
that successfully hacks Neato Robotics's XV-11 floor vacuuming robot's
laser rangefinder and releases open source documentation/drivers for
using it on a robot. This type of sensor would be a great asset to small
(and large) mobile robots and it's a steal for the $399 it costs to buy
the Neato robot. I want to kickstart the process of documenting how to
use it.

Maybe a kickstarter
campaign should be set up because Willaim's $200
bounty has already been upped to $300. RobotNV on the Trossen Robotics
forums is contributing another $100 towards the bounty. Anyone else out
there want to chip in a few bucks to help promote software freedom and
help reverse engineer some pretty cool hardware for robots?
   

http://robots.net/article/3074.html
     

[Freddy]

This needs someone like TrueAndroids me thinks...