Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexanderTheOK
Wow... I had no idea I would never use this camera until now.
Seriously though, even with a discount, that's a lot of money for that product. I get that it has a high resolution but I honestly can't see who in the FRC community is actually going to use this.
Largely because the alternative is an Xbox 360 kinect, a device that has had half a decade of being developed for by the community. Seriously setting up SLAM for a kinect in ROS is almost easier than installing the FRC plugins.
Also, when I got another for myself a few months ago it was 25 bucks used at GS, so unless the discount is quite literally an order of magnitude, I don't have much hope for this device.
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Yes, not every team will want to use this camera, but for the teams who do it is now an option. The ZED camera and the Kinect tackle the problem of depth maps in two completely different ways.
The Kinect utilizes an IR pattern projector and an IR camera to analyze the pattern deformation to generate the depth map of the environment. This is great for an indoor environment with constant light and no windows, however try using a Kinect outside and all of a sudden you have a normal RGB camera with very close to no depth detection. The Kinect has a max distance of 4m(~13ft).
The ZED however utilizes dual RGB cameras, which I bet are synced by hardware, to generate a disparity map. This has the advantage for both indoor and outdoor environments where light pollution, such as IR light(The Sun), would be a problem. The ZED has a max distance of 20m(~65ft). There is also the option to use a up to 120 FPS, where the Kinect is limited to a max FPS of 30.
Yes the ZED is an expensive camera compared to the Kinect, but the Kinect was merely adopted into computer vision for robotics, the ZED was born into it, designed for it.
