Accurate, 3D sensing for factories has previously been prohibitively expensive. Time-of-flight chip advancements recently seen in personal mobile devices help make this is no longer the case.
As industrial environments become more and more automated, with higher and higher throughput attended to by fewer people, machines need to be able to see more.
For a visual sensor to be effective in such environments, it must be robust and reliable, and housed in packaging that can take the occasional bump. It should also, if it’s possible, still perform reliably when there are light and colour changes.
Lidar in its various forms is a common sensing modality in such environments, as it has been elsewhere since it became affordable in the 1990s.