And the hacks keep coming. The ever-versatile Kinect peripheral for the Xbox 360 continues to wow everyone after the drivers were cracked and ported to Linux. Now, we’ve seen almost everything. Michael Schweitzer and Michael Himmelsbach at the University of Bundeswehr Munich have combined an XPS laptop with the Kinect sensor and a RC car and created an autonomous viehicle.

A Kinect sensor is mounted onto a small car-like robot (a 1:10 VW Touareg). A planar inverse depth model of the ground surface is verified against the depth images provided by the Kinect sensor to build an occupancy grid of the robot’s environment. The path the robot takes is then determined by a reactive navigation approach called “tentacles”.

Watching the video, it’s apparent that it has a slight problem when it comes to driving into doorways, but everything else seemed to go great! According to comments by the creators, the door issue occurred because they’re still calibrating the odometer—the programming doesn’t take into account the size of the vehicle yet, so it’s unaware of how obstacles it’s already passed can affect it when it makes turns.

The software they’re running on the laptop is a simplified version of the reactive navigation used to drive the school’s submission to the Darpa Urban Challenge, the MuCAR-3.

Perhaps with this upgrade, the Kinect could drive itself to the store to buy Microsoft points for its own DLC content from Xbox Live.