Solving Picking Challenges with Zivid 2+ 3D Vision

Here comes the Zivid 2+ family.

At the beginning of June we launched the first camera in the Zivid 2+ camera line up: the Zivid 2+ M130. Yet we realized that this camera does not quite cover all of the automation needs, so we have introduced two more cameras: the M60 and the L110. With these cameras you can cover a variety of tasks from big to small. Anything from robot mounted depal, to piece picking, to inspection, can now all be solved with the same camera family, making the integration a piece of cake. Let’s look take a look at this next generation of 3D cameras and what it brings. 

Unsurpassed point cloud quality

Zivid 2+ M60, M130, and L110 3D camera models

The Zivid 2+ 3D camera family introduces a range of new features, but if there’s one thing that simply blows people’s socks of, it’s the point clouds. The Zivid 2+ family all come equipped with 5 megapixel cameras, capturing both 2D RGB and 3D in full high resolution detail. This new camera, combined with a stronger projector allow for more data, with more confidence than before. What you will see are scenes that are packed with data, next to no holes, practically zero noise. To be clear, this is not a hardware only effort, but improved firmware and software as well to provide improved pipelines for the filtering, down sampling and delivery of the data. 

The new density and quality of data seen in the Zivid 2+ family makes it not just suited for transparent, but to accomplish practically any task. No matter the goal, having clean surfaces and complete data helps to provide the best starting point possible for all segmentation, detection, classification and picking software.

Seeing everything. Even transparency

A point cloud example of transparent objects captured with Zivid 2+ M130 3D camera

With the Zivid 2+ we have opened doors that have been previously viewed as near unattainable. The imaging of transparent items and packaging often came at a steep cost, in the form of time, money, or quality. With the Zivid 2+ and a team of crazy intelligent people from Zivid and Sintef we have found the key to imaging transparency. In half a second, the Zivid 2+ M130 is capable of imaging a mixed SKU bin containing a variety of objects from piece picking that most of the vision industry would find extremely difficult or impossible to get high-quality data on. To put this in perspective, there is a major conference on overcoming the challenge of transparent objects in 3D machine vision later this year.

Zivid has redesigned how to approach temporal structure light 3D imaging with its newest implementation. Seeing transparency with this technology has opened doors in how we see anything, and everything. We have redesigned our approach to shiny objects and improved our quality of imaging across the board.

Omni engine, the all-seeing eye

What we wanted to achieve required us  to go back to the basics and totally rethink how 3D machine vision. Clearly, we will not share the secret sauce, but through cross disciplinary teamwork we have created the Omni-engine. This engine takes advantage of the hardware improvements applied to this camera and turned it into a full-stack overhaul. Omni Engine is at the heart of these new possibilities with Zivid 2+ and we are extremely proud to be able to share it, and the amazing point clouds it produces with all of you.

 
The omni-engine is available across all the new Zivid 2+ cameras and its core DNA. We have been able to apply a lot of the learnings and amazing techniques developed with the omni-engine to other aspects of our imaging capabilities, making these cameras able to fit across a broad range of automation. 

Zivid 2+ M60

This is Zivid’s ‘close work’ 3D camera with a focus distance of 60 cm, it has a wide viewing angle and consequently offers a good FOV across a working distance of 30cm to 110cm. At its focus distance the FOV coverage is 57 x 46 cm.

The M60 is the go-to camera when the highest quality is needed. The M60 is designed for those close-up applications, where tight tolerances come into play. With an extremely dense point cloud, providing a spatial resolution of 120µm at 30cm from the camera, this camera can catch some of the smallest contours. 

An example of PCB captured with Zivid 2+ M60 3D camera

This 3D camera is designed to deliver its best when mounted on the robot arm to find the perfect viewpoint and to accurately capture exactly what you need to see. This camera enables precision assembly, inspection and robot guiding tasks, for example in automotive, whitegoods and additive manufacturing. 

Zivid 2+ L110

Zivid 2+ L110 comes with a wide viewing angle camera at working distances from 70 to 170 cm meaning it offers a generous working area and volume when mounted on larger collaborative robots and industrial robots. This 3D camera is very adaptable, but there are some obvious ‘good fits’ when it comes to use cases.

One is depalletization of boxes from euro pallets, here a larger industrial robot has the L110 mounted on the arm near the end effector. In this scenario a fully stacked euro pallet can be fully serviced within the working volume of the L110. Another example is again using the L110 mounted on the robot arm for bin-picking from multiple bins in the same view or picking from large deep bins with complete bin coverage. 

A point cloud example of a stacked pallet captured with Zivid 2+ L110 3D camera

The L110 is ideal for these robot-mounted applications that require broad scene coverage but is equally at home in statically mounted situations where it suits the application.

Zivid 2+ M130

The flagship 3D camera in the Zivid 2+ line up is the M130, which since its launch in June has already been shipping to customers. M130 is purposefully designed to enable piece-picking projects in e-commerce. However, there is a lot of cross-over in automation and across industries. The attributes that make it ideal for piece-picking also make it perfect for high-speed, performant bin-picking. 

This camera is set to a longer focus distance of 130cm, making it ideal for stationary mounting above the working scene while providing ample robot clearance. In piece picking scenarios being able to separate the camera from the robot so that they can perform tasks in parallel can be crucial to minimizing cycle times in the process. The M130 also works well when mounted from any distance between 60cm to 200cm away from the scene and has an aspect ratio of 4:3 that is used in most common bins. 

3D and 2D data, unified

While this is not a new feature in the Zivid 2+ family, having a complete dataset from one device is something that we believe if a crucial part of the cameras we build. With the Zivid point cloud each pixel delivers an array of data, in a pixel-by-pixel format. This simplifies both the software and hardware needs for an automation system. When working with Zivid 3D cameras developers get to work with an orderly array of data, each pixel can contain 3D (XYZ), 2D RGB image, depth map data, surface normal data and SNR (signal to noise ratio). There is no extra calibration necessary, no switching between different vendors APIs, and no need for extra data or timing allowances. What you have is two products in one: a high resolution 5-megapixel 2D camera, and a very high accuracy 3D camera that hands off data in a coherent manner, pixel-by-pixel. We know from working with developers and integrators this makes life easier and leads to more robust solutions that are easier to maintain.

A new breed that retains our strong DNA

The Zivid 2+ lineup is without doubt a true step up in what can be expected of a 3D machine vision product, but we want to pay some credit to the previous learnings that helped get us here. We have kept the same learnings we picked up in developing and supporting Zivid Two. That camera has variously been described as a ‘beast’, and an ‘astonishingly accurate 3D camera’ by our customers. Zivid 2+ has all the industrial ruggedness you have come to expect from us. We still put every single camera through rounds of qualification, consisting of hours of tests and calibration, we still shock test them at 15 G, still shake them about at 5G, still bake them way above working temperature and swing them around on robots at different orientations. All the while monitoring and checking that they still perform to specification. No corners have been cut on giving you an industrial 3D camera you can trust every time, all the time. 

As a company genuinely committed to making life easy for our customers all the existing Zivid 2 accessories are compatible with Zivid 2+ products along with the Zivid tools and SDK.

In summary, are you ready to change things?

All in all, the Zivid 2+ family is ready for your innovation, and equally ready to blow your mind. There’s not much more to say, you just have to test it out, and I guarantee you’ll never want to let it go. Check out our point cloud library and get ahead of the competition with Zivid 2+.