This project is being done at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It's being worked on by Murph Finnicum and his advisor Sam King
We required a somewhat general purpose robot, and decided to make our own by combining the iRobot Create with a Kinect and a netbook. This doesn't seem to be at all unpopular. We started with all our own code, but then transitioned to using the ROS project.