Glossary · Hardware
Depth camera
In brief
A depth camera produces an image where each pixel encodes distance instead of (or in addition to) color. Common technologies: structured light (Intel RealSense), time-of-flight, and stereo. Used for object recognition, manipulation, and close-range obstacle detection.
Depth cameras are the manipulation-side complement to LIDAR. Where LIDAR is good for far-field geometry, depth cameras give you dense, high-resolution depth at close range — exactly what you need to grasp an object, identify cluttered shelves, or guide a hand into a tight space.
Most humanoids carry depth cameras at the head and sometimes in the wrists or hands. The Intel RealSense series has been the default for years; newer designs increasingly use stereo + neural depth estimation to skip dedicated sensors.
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See it in the wild
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Glossary entries are upstream. The catalog is where the implementations live.