question about choosing cameras.

[zting1]

Hi,

We make a mobile robot with dual arms, now we want to choose a camera for the arm and a camera for the mobile platform, that is a camera for manipulation and a camera for slam.

The candidate is D400 series and sr300. As I know, the sr300 is suited for close range and indoor. Maybe it is a better choice. I want to know whether is sr300 preciser than D435 in close range outdoor also. If also, there will be no hesitate to choose the sr300 for manipulation and D435 or D415 for slam.

[MartyG · Accepted solution]

The 400 Series is suitable for both indoor and outdoor. At very close range though, the SR300 is more accurate though because it uses a depth units scale of 1/32 mm, whereas the 400 Series uses a depth units scale of 1 mm. This means that the 400 Series has a longer range, but doesn't do as well at very close range. You can though change the depth units scale of the 400 Series though, so you could set it to match the depth units of the SR300. This may make it feasible to use the 400 Series for both arm and mobile platform.

If you do choose the 400 Series, the D435 has a smaller minimum range (20 cm) than the D415 (30 cm), meaning that you can get closer to objects with the D435. The D435 will also be a good choice if the arm will be fast-moving, as the D435 has a faster 'global shutter' that copes well with fast motion, whereas the D415 uses a slower 'rolling shutter' that may leave smears or artifacts on the image when tracking high-speed motion.

The D435 also has a wider field of view than D415, meaning that you can fit more of an observed scene into its viewpoint.

The 400 Series is better able to cope with outdoor conditions than SR300 because of a component inside it called the Vision Processor D4. Unlike most depth cameras, the 400 Series actually performs better in strong light thanks to the D4.

If you need very high quality tracking data, you can pair the new RealSense T265 Tracking Camera with a depth-sensing camera such as D435. The T265 does not have depth sensing and instead can provide very high quality and stable SLAM called V-SLAM.

https://click.intel.com/order-intel-realsense-tracking-camera-t265.html

If you prefer to just have two cameras on your robot, you can still achieve very good SLAM with the D435i model that has a built-in IMU component.

https://github.com/intel-ros/realsense/wiki/SLAM-with-D435i?language=en_US