Hardware

Stereo Camera

A stereo camera is a sensor with two imagers separated by a fixed baseline that recovers depth by triangulating pixel correspondences between the views, with depth accuracy proportional to baseline and inversely related to distance. Active stereo variants like the Intel RealSense D400 series project an infrared texture pattern to aid matching on featureless surfaces. Stereo provides passive, sunlight-tolerant depth, unlike time-of-flight sensors, at the cost of correspondence failures on textureless or reflective regions.

Why it matters for physical AI

Affordable dense depth from stereo heads feeds grasp planning, obstacle avoidance, and imitation learning datasets, making these sensors near-ubiquitous on manipulation and mobile platforms alike.