Orbbec

Orbbec is a Chinese maker of 3D depth cameras. It does not build robots; it builds the "eyes" for other people's machines: modules that combine a colour image with a distance map and end up in mobile robots, arms and bin-picking cells. For an integrator it is one of the more affordable alternatives to Intel RealSense or the OAK cameras from Luxonis.

The best documented line is Femto. The Femto Bolt is a compact camera (115 × 40 × 65 mm) with a 1-megapixel ToF sensor, a 4K RGB camera with HDR and a six-axis IMU, powered and read out over a single USB-C cable at an average draw of 4.35 W. The maker states that the depth technology comes from Microsoft and works in the same modes as the Azure Kinect and the Femto Mega. The wide mode (120° × 120°) covers 0.25-2.21 m, the narrow mode (75° × 65°) reaches 3.86 m, or 5.46 m when binned. Typical systematic error is below 11 mm plus 0.1% of distance. The Femto Mega shares the optics but adds an onboard NVIDIA Jetson Nano and Power over Ethernet (PoE), so image processing can run inside the camera itself.

The second family is stereo and structured light. The Gemini 2 (2023) uses active infrared stereo, sees 91° × 66° and delivers depth from 0.15 to 10 m at up to 1280 × 800 and 30 frames per second; the maker names robotics as its main use. The Astra 2 uses structured light, measures 0.6-8 m at 1600 × 1200 and is meant for indoor work. The newest Gemini 330 series is stereo with a working range from 0.1 m to beyond 20 m depending on the variant, also outdoors.

What does this mean for a robot's cost and capability? Three-dimensional perception decides whether an arm pulls a part from a bin and whether an mobile robots platform steers around a person. A camera instead of a laser scanner lowers the cost of the whole cell, at the price of robustness against sunlight and shiny surfaces, which matters in warehouses settings. A cobot without its own vision, such as the UR10e from Universal Robots, usually gets a camera from an outside supplier; the Neura MAiRA S has perception built in, so an external camera is not essential there. In humanoids the depth camera is one sensor among several, as we explain in “How Does a Humanoid Robot Work”.

In Poland we have no confirmed exclusive Orbbec distributor. Interested buyers should ask machine-vision integrators and robotics electronics shops about availability; prices depend on the model and we do not quote them here because the maker does not publish them in its datasheets. How to read such sheets is covered in “How to Read a Robot Datasheet”. The stated ranges apply to surfaces with a defined reflectivity, and in full sunlight ToF and structured-light cameras lose range.