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Zivid announced the availability of its 3D camera for general-purpose robotic picking, the Zivid 2+. Watch the product launch keynote:

The 3D camera e-commerce automation has been waiting for.

The high-speed and demanding world of e-commerce has been at the vanguard of robotic automation deployment for many years. Modern fulfillment centers are alive with automated transport of thousands, or in some cases millions of SKUs (stock keeping units). Whilst automation thrived in these centers, one stubborn problem has remained: reliable piece-picking of all these items. 

Take a moment to think about the immense inventory variation: shapes, colors, sizes, and the nemesis of 3D vision thus far; transparent objects, wrapping, and polybags. These items have proved to be a major hurdle in e-commerce automation. To date, machine vision fails to cope with these challenging objects with any degree of assuredness or speed. Consequently, pick and place robot cells are left to address what can only be considered ‘the easy to pick stuff’, which is a very small portion of the items a fulfillment center handles daily.  Because of this, the majority of item picking is still entrusted to human operators.

Zivid 2+ packs more power into one unique package.

Zivid 2+ addresses the demands of high-mix SKU piece picking in one package with its state-of-the-art hardware capabilities. It expands the horizons of 3D vision and enables what was previously considered impossible to do. The Zivid 2+ is one camera for all piece-picking needs; object recognition, segmentation, pose estimation, and collision checking. This enables the robot to pick and pack any object swiftly and reliably, without damage. 

The Zivid 2+ is fitted with:

• Native transparency 3D capture technology.
• 5-megapixel image sensor.
• Dynamic high-powered pattern projector.
• Combined 2D and 3D imaging.
• Field-of-view tailored for piece picking.

See everything.

Transparent and highly reflective items have proved notoriously difficult to consistently image with 3D machine vision systems and have stood as an unresolvable challenge across the automation community. Plastic bottles, items that are packaged in poly bags, bubble wrap, or other transparent containers comprise a significant part of the inventory in an e-commerce fulfillment center. The Zivid 2+ now brings innovative 3D technology to unveil transparent objects through the reimagination of what’s possible with temporal structured light. 

The path to solving transparency also proved integral to making vast improvements in the imaging of highly reflective objects commonly found in manufacturing. Zivid 2+ also shows better performance on matte dark materials with more robustness against ambient light, giving the user more performance out of a faster capture time. This new technology is capable of capturing a bin filled with shiny, transparent, and dark materials together in one go. 

Everything in the bin is now fully visible.

Øyvind Theie, VP of Products at Zivid, said “We have been working closely with some of the most innovative players in the robotic automation of order fulfillment, and we know exactly where their pain points are with both 3D and 2D machine vision systems. They need a 3D camera that truly will see everything by producing clean and complete point clouds – without compromising on speed. Together with our customers, we have developed a product that truly meets the demands of a high-performance piece-picking cell.”

Felipe, Co-Founder and Head of Robotics at Reframe Systems, said, “Zivid 2+’s performance is uncompromising across an impossible range of applications. That is only possible because of their R&D first DNA, not afraid to think big, be creative, and relentlessly push boundaries.”

Capturing transparent objects in 3D is something that the industry had yet to solve. Without this, a robot can reliably handle only a limited portion of the warehouse inventory, this is the reason, robots are only being used in a fraction of the piece-picking operations in fulfillment centers. Zivid was determined to make a camera to replace all others and handle any object presented to it, and that included transparent ones. Zivid 2+ is both a 3D and a 2D camera, which really simplifies the integration and calibration of a piece-picking robot cell. The company has road tested this technology with the leading integrators in e-commerce, logistics, and bin picking.