The LiDAR principle (English for “light detection and ranging”) is often used when robots or autonomous vehicles have to orientate themselves in the immediate vicinity. High-quality vacuum cleaner robots, for example, are a popular application – here, however, the environment is usually scanned with a rotating laser beam. Classic lidar scanners measure the time of flight of the laser light pulses emitted and reflected by the object.

The example program represents the Depth information of the Onion Tau as a false color image and as a point cloud.

In the meantime, however, there are sensors on the market that do without lasers and instead record the flight duration of the reflected light flash over a large area can – something like this is built into the luxury version of the iPhone 12. With the Onion Tau LiDAR camera there is now a reasonably inexpensive (179 US- $) possibility for makers to get depth images.

The Onion Tau provides a resolution of the distance map of 160 × 60 pixels and a frame rate of 30 fps; A grayscale image with the same resolution can be superimposed on the distance image for orientation. It detects objects in the range 10 cm up to 4.5 m away. The acquisition of the depth image is completely independent of the ambient light.

An extensive Python library is available for integration into your own projects; the developers emphasize that the camera can be addressed like a webcam and that the programming effort is therefore limited. The crowdfunding project has already achieved its funding goal; Delivery is to begin at the end of May 2021.

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