UR5e meets Zivid One+

Using UR5e with robot mounted Canon 80D to showcase Zivid One+

Sometimes we need to do something because it’s fun, and at Zivid, we do have regular “hackathons,” where we go outside of our regular duties to test and brainstorm ideas.

In this project, I’m focusing on robot mounted cameras. At the end of this article, I’ve published the final video we created: “UR5e meets Zivid One+”.

Before going into more detail, here’s a clip of what you’d expect from a typical robot mounted camera application, with Zivid One+ 3D color camera mounted together with a Robotiq gripper on a UR5e collaborative robot.

Robot mounted 3D vision is beneficial in a lot of industrial automation applications, especially bin-picking and inspection tasks. Your 3D camera can get closer to target objects, and you get lots of flexibility in terms of both 2D and 3D imaging poses.

However, for this little marketing pet project, I chose our UR5e as our chief cameraman to highlight some of the features of the Zivid One+. So instead of mounting the 3D camera on the robot, we let the Zivid One+ be the hero and use our trusty DSLR to capture it.

The benefits of a robot-guided camera from a marketing perspective, are that you get super smooth tracks and, potentially depending on the programmer, some exciting angles and speed changes — and it’s all 100% repeatable! Post-process, you can mix and match clips easily, and adding tracked objects like text is also a breeze.

Compared to professional camera robots like the Kira solution, our little Zivid-hack setup does not feature a focus, iris, or zoom control. So we had to use the Canon 80Ds flexible and, purely subjective, superior autofocus. The Universal Robots UR5e also does not have reach like the Kira setup, so we had to limit our shots to the front and back, and merge them during editing. Even if robots are becoming easier to use, the final thing to remember is that it requires someone with previous knowledge to program these robots. In the end, we had a lot of fun during our hackathon.

So finally, here’s the result from our little robot mounted camera for marketing gig:

If you’re interested in robot mounted cameras for industrial applications, feel free to reach out to our sales team who can help you with 3D machine vision for industrial applications, both on robots or stationary mounted.