The Open Lidar Project - Hack the Neato XV-11 Lidar for a Bounty!

[gallamine]

Howdy robot builders,
I got inspired by Adafruit's Open Kinect hacking contest, so I thought, "hmm, what else needs hacking?" Then it occured to me that I could sponsor a hacking contest for the Neato Robotics XV-11 laser rangefinder! Currently $300 ($200 from me, and and $100 from RobotNV on the TrossenRobotics forums) is up for grabs to the first person that releases open source docs/drivers for using the lidar on a robot.
More details here:
http://robotbox.net/blog/gallamine/open-lidar-project-hack-neato-xv-11-lidar-200-bounty

Tell your friends. Happy building!

[Razor Concepts]

A while back I e-mailed Neato about buying the range sensors and they said "Spare parts should be available in the next few months"

Looks like this contest won't get any entries for a while 

[gallamine]

Maybe so, but the sensor itself is worth the $400 - the next closest sensor in functionality/price is well over $1,000.

It's not hard to vacuum a floor, but it is hard to build a scanning lidar system I'm hoping someone will pop up soon to claim the bounty!

[gallamine]

Trossen Robotics has chipped in another $100 to bring the bounty to $400! That means if you get it hacked, you've recouped the cost of the robot!

[gallamine]

Just got an email from RobotShop. They are upping the bounty (again!) and offering to refund the cost of the robot, if you buy it from them!
http://www.robotshop.com/ProductInfo.aspx?pc=RB-Nto-01
No excuses now.

[gallamine]

There's been some nice advances in the project:

1) RoboDynamics has offered $200 to the first person that uses the XV-11 sensor in a SLAM application for navigating and mapping between two points in a map.

2) There's a nice writeup on the SparkFun blog doing a teardown of the device. Lots of people have been analyzing the data posted there: http://www.sparkfun.com/news/490

3) User Xevel on the Trossen Robotics forum has made a visualization of the data from the Sparkfun post. http://forums.trossenrobotics.com/showthread.php?t=4470&page=6