The Open Lidar Project - Hack the Neato XV-11 Lidar for a $400 Bounty!

Howdy folks,

I got inspired by Adafruit's Kinect Hacking bounty and got to thinking. What if I sponsored a hacking project myself? So, I got to thinking and decided we really needed to get the Neato Robotics XV-11 scanning lidar system hacked and useful to robot builders. So, I'm offering up $401 ($201 from me,, $100 from RobotNV, and Trossen Robotics is putting in another $100 !) to the first person that documents the hacking and releases open source drivers for using the rangefinder!

You can get the full scoop on my robot site, RobotBox.

Tell your friends! Happy hacking.

[Updates]

There's been some nice advances in the project:

1) RobotShop will refund the price of the robot if the hacker bought it from them ($399).

2) 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.

3) 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

4) User Xevel on the Trossen Robotics forum has made a visualization of the data from the Sparkfun post. http://forums.trossenrobotics.com/showt ... 470&page=6 

We're now waiting to see if someone with the actual robot can plot the data and verify we've got it correctly.