Tau LiDAR 3D Depth Camera

The Tau LiDAR camera from Onion Corporation makes it easy and quick to get started with 3D depth sensing and mapping applications. It is designed to be plug-and-play and minimize the time required to get usable 3D depth data as part of any use case requiring physical environment knowledge. The LiDAR time-of-flight (ToF) camera outputs 160x60 pixels of depth data in real time and a grayscale scene image at a maximum of 30 frames per second. The range for depth sensing is 0.1 m to 4.5 m. The depth data can be visualized in 3D or 2D for use by humans, or it can be used as input for a program or algorithm.

The Tau camera works similarly to a regular webcam: plug it into a computer with a USB cable, and it will send real-time data immediately. The key difference is that frames from the Tau camera include depth measurements because of the LiDAR ToF sensor. It can output frames as 2D depth maps, 3D point clouds, regular 2D images, and array/matrix objects in programs.

Use the Tau Studio, a companion web-based application, to visualize the camera output in real-time with a browser on a connected computer. Tau Studio takes the real-time depth data from the Tau camera and visualizes it as a grayscale image, a depth map, and a 3D point cloud the user can manipulate using pan, rotate, and zoom.

Create custom applications with the Tau Camera Python library using the depth data from the camera. The library provides an easy-to-use API to configure the camera and capture depth data and is compatible with OpenCV. The API is open source, has rich documentation, and comes with example programs meant to jump-start development.