The 3D camera detects scenes and objects in their spatial dimensions at a glance. In contrast to laser scanners it does not require moving components and is thus robust and wear-free. It measures the distance between the sensor and the nearest surface point by point using the time-of-flight principle. The camera illuminates the scene with an internal infrared light source and calculates the distance by means of the light reflected from the surface.
Applications can be found in such areas as packaging, storage and materials handling, airport logistics, collision avoidance, robotics, monitoring of space and persons.
If the camera is integrated into a machine, the measured data can be evaluated with common image processing libraries. A software development kit with code samples is available in different programming languages.