Sometimes is hard to find what you need especially when you’re interested to build a robot based on Kinect sensor. In this article, we explore seven best tutorials from where you can learn how to interface the Arduino board with the Kinect 3D sensor in order to control a car, a helicopter, or actuators.

The Microsoft Kinect sensor has an affordable price and this is a critical criterion in the context of DIY robots. More expensive sensors may be used for better data, but up to a point the Kinect does a great job.

Using Kinect with Arduino is perhaps the best option to control the robots using gesture or to scan the environment. The tutorials presented below explain you in details how to interface the Kinect with Arduino to respond at the information taken from the 3D sensor.

Fueling a revolution in robotics, the Kinect sensor is not just a simple device used by gamers to interact using the movement of the hands, this is a tool used in robotics for scanning and control. The gestures of the users are interpreting using a standard video camera, a depth camera, and by projecting an infrared laser grid onto surfaces and create information by scanning the distortions in the digital mesh. The same 3D sensor is used for voice command recognition, a feature that can be used together with the gesture interpretation or just for voice controls.

Since 2010 when the Kinect was released, the sensor was used in a wide range of service and industrial applications.

Used by hobbyists, students or even researchers, the 3D sensor enables users to control the robot and scan the environment.

From simple to complex applications, the Kinect sensor is used in applications like flying robots that pilots itself, attached to aquadcopter for 3D mapping, control arm, as a tool to control a robot that drawing, remote-control vehicle, biometric recognition, 3D modeling interface, or to control fast and accurate parallel robots.

Below you can find a series of tutorials to learn how to control the Arduino board through a Microsoft Kinect sensor.

• CakeRobot – A Gesture Driven Robot That Follows Your Hand Movements Using Arduino, C# and Kinect – using a DIY Arduino board and the Kinect sensor, the creator of this project spends some time to build a robot that can be controlled using the Kinect sensor. In this tutorial you can find the components, programming code, how to interface the Arduino board with Kinect sensor, and many more details to build your own project;
• Kinect controls Arduino wired Servos using Visual Basic 2010 – using VB programming lines, the Arduino board and Kinect sensor, from this tutorial you can learn how to control the rotation of two servos interfaced with an Arduino board using gesture of the hands;
• Kinect – using a laptop, an Arduino board, LiPo battery, Kinect sensor, and XBee shield for wireless communication you can control two servos only with hand movements;
• iPad- and Kinect-Controlled Car – this is perhaps one of the best project for beginners aiming to control a car remotely using a Kinect sensor and hand gesture, or an iPad;
• Tutorial: how to control an IR helicopter programmatically with Arduino, Android, Kinect, brain, and more! – from this tutorial you can learn how to be a magician, or better said how to lift off the ground a helicopter using only hand gestures. Using the SYMA S107 helicopter, a Kinect sensor to detect the gesture of the hands, and an Arduino board, the final project is a helicopter controlled using just the hands;
• Kinect Driven Arduino Powered Hand – in this article you can find resources to build an Arduino powered hand that can be driven by a Kinect sensor. The 3D sensor is programmed to detect the hand, check the position of the fingers, and send all this information to the Arduino;
• Kinect To Arduino – programming lines that return the user action captured by a Kinect sensor connected to an Arduino board.