Over the last decade, the availability of public image repositories and recognition benchmarks has enabled rapid progress in visual object category and instance detection. Today we are witnessing the birth of a new generation of sensing technologies capable of providing high quality synchronized videos of both color and depth, the RGB-D (Kinect style) camera. With its advanced sensing capabilities and the potential for mass adoption, this technology represents an opportunity to dramatically increase robotic object recognition, manipulation, navigation, and interaction capabilities. Recently, sensors combining RGB images with depth measurements (RGB-D sensors) have come to prominence due to their gaming applications and in particular due to the release of the Xbox 360 Kinect (Microsoft, 2010). Such sensors are now both very affordable (around $150) and readily available, making them ideal for personal robotics applications.
