Baby Robots and Tiny Depth Cameras

[Luxonis-Brandon]

Hi everyone,

Some of you might know me from popular hits such as the OG OAK KickStarter launch announcement (here), the discussion about the RealSense “wind down” (here), and trying to keep my friends from getting run over from distracted drivers (here).

Well, I’m back! And I’m here to tell you we have a little camera that might be a good replacement for a Sonar sensor:

Or at least it’s priced like one (a nice one).

So why does this thing exist? Well, it’s a long story - but mainly - it seemed like there were a TON of folks who need low-cost depth perception + AI + CV + general business logic all embedded into a tiny product.

So we made it.

And it’s launching in 4.25 hours on KickStarter:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/opencv/opencv-ai-kit-oak-depth-camera-4k-cv-edge-object-detection

Campaign price of $89. If you catch it early, $79. And if super early, $74.

• 4K video h.265 onboard. Capable of JPEG at 13MP, lossless JPEG. All sorts of encodings.
• 1.4 TOPS onboard neural inference. Can do semantic depth (single-class) as ~27FPS (here).
• A bunch of hardware-accelerated CV functions (Sobel, Harris/Shi-Thomasi + Optical Flow, etc.
• Capability to run Python3.9 scripts directly on the camera for pipeline flow control, business, logic, etc. So you can tie together AI/CV/depth to do things all on-camera like face blurring (here), depth-driven focus (here), and all sorts of other cool things like here), all on-camera.
• Oh and depth. It has a 640x480 global shutter grayscale stereo pair. Capable of 200+FPS at 640x480. Here is just plain 30FPS though, along with, you know, since that’s posted on the internet - someone’s dogging on it.

Anyway. Our hope is this thing will be like a Swiss Army Knife. But for computer vision, robotics, etc.

Multi-purpose, tiny, & useful - but you’re still going to want a table saw.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Brandon

[juliussss]

What would be the minimal range? Could it do <30cm?
Something so small would be great for end effectors

[Luxonis-Brandon]

Great question @juliussss . So the default minimum depth with 96-disparity range is 35cm. But extended disparity (192) can be run as well, which divides this depth in 1/2, so 17.5cm. So likely, yes. But we need to do more testing for that usecase as I don’t immediately recall the min focal distance for the cameras.

Scratch that, it’s on the KickStarter. Yes, 17.5cm should be fine.

[msadowski]

Wow, that was a quick campaign! Congrats on meeting your goal so fast!

[Luxonis-Brandon]

Thanks @msadowski ! Excited to get this little Swiss Army Knife out to everyone. It’s so easy to mount to anything. Mine has lived on my bike (RadWagon 4) for quite a while now.