On MyzharBot v4, the Asus Xtion Pro Live RGB-D sensor has been replaced by a powerful stereo camera, in order to overcome the limitations of the Primesense technology in outdoor environment under the direct sunlight.
The stereo camera installed on MyzharBot-v4 is the “ZED” made by Stereolabs, a robust high definition stereo camera powered by CUDA.
ZED Stereo Camera by Stereolabs
ZED camera is really interesting not only for its hardware features, but also because the Stereolabs developers are making a really good work with their CUDA based SDK.
The collaboration born between Stereolabs and Nvidia brought the ZED camera to be suddenly supported by the Nvidia Jetson TK1 platform, making it the first stereo camera that natively uses the power of CUDA on an embedded platform.
The installation on the Nvidia Jetson is really straightforward and the guide is available on the official Stereolabs’ blog.
One important thing to be emphasized is that ZED camera requires the maximum performances available on the Tegra K1 soc, so the installation script of the ZED camera enables by default at boot the “full performance” mode (exactly as you can find on the Jetson configuration tutorial).
Finally the ZED SDK is provided with a lot of examples, one of that is the most important for MyzharBot v4 and it is about the use of the ZED camera under ROS framework to extract the RGB informations and the Depth map, without the needing of a hard and not always easy stereo vision calibration.
