American company Seegrid, which specialises in autonomous 3D vision navigation, uses cameras to navigate the warehouse with its “Vision Guided Vehicle.”
“We take pictures in stereo – five pairs of cameras to cover the entire dome – with a 360 degree view around it,” says Jeff Christensen, vice president of products. “By using two cameras looking in the same direction, like binocular vision. “Each human eye looks differently - the slight difference gives us a depth of field. We do exactly the same thing.
“We can deliver that disparity of image, reading three dimensions with just cameras.”
The machine, which is used by the likes of Amazon, BMW and Whirlpool, takes photos as it travels through the warehouse – stitches them together into a 3D space, where thousands of points become a digital fingerprint of one point.