One More Thing... A Contest!

We promised you some early holiday Kinect presents, and we hope you like what you've seen:

• OpenNI, complete with Kinect and ROS integration.
• iRobot Create + Kinect tutorial
• Kinect calibration and technical guide
• IR image access in libfreenect

We've been impressed with what we've seen from you:

• Minority Report interface
• Kinect on a Quadrotor
• RGB-D Project at Intel Labs Seattle/University of Washington.

In fact, hacks based on ROS, PCL, or OpenCV took three out of the seven "best kinect hacks" on TechCrunch.

Now, it's time to take it up a notch.

ROS 3D Contest

We invite you to combine an RGB-D sensor (e.g. Kinect, PSDK5.0) with ROS to produce something new, interesting, and fun. It could be anything, from a novel robot control interface to a data-driven art project to pure computer vision. Bonus points if it's also useful (see below). We're offering $8K in prizes.

As we promote open-source software, we encourage participants to share, and our rules and judging will reward participants who act in the spirit of collaboration.

Rules

• All entries must be open source using an OSI-approved license and be hosted on a publicly accessible server.
• Entries must compatible with ROS and an RGB-D sensor (e.g. Kinect, PSDK5.0).
• Videos must be Creative Commons licensed. In submitting the video, you give Willow Garage permission to include snippets of your video in a montage video (with attribution).
• You can use whatever additional hardware you want. Entries that include custom hardware modifications are encouraged to post instructions for reproducing.
• You may enter as many entries as you like and as early as you like.

Deadline: All entries must be submitted by January 23, 2011.

Helpful Links

• ROS OpenNI driver (OS X users may wish to use the libfreenect-based ROS Kinect Driver)
• ROS Installation
• ROS Tutorials
• Point Cloud Library
• OpenCV
• Search for existing ROS libraries

Judging Criteria

We will be using the Iron Chef judging system to rate each entry:

Taste (10 pts)
Presentation (i.e. Documentation) (5 pts)
Originality (5 pts)

For the "taste" score, judges will take into account how well each entry uses the "secret ingredients" (ROS + RGB-D).

For the "originality" score, credit will go to the first entry (by date) to demonstrate a particular idea. Your entry can still be "original" even if subsequent entries use the same idea.

Prizes

• First Place: $3000
• Second Place: $2000
• Third Place: $1000
• "Most Useful": $2000

A special "Most Useful" prize will be awarded to the entry that provides the most useful, re-usable capabilities to the open-source community. As evidence of usefulness, judges will be biased towards entries that are used by other contest participants. This includes contributions to the underlying ROS drivers and OpenNI integration.

How to Enter

Contest Deadline: January 23, 2011

Entry page

Enter early, enter often!