Intel announces compact indoor lidar camera

Intel has announced the first product in the RealSense LiDAR family. The RealSense LiDAR L515 has a diameter of 61 mm and can be used, among other things, to provide indoor robots with depth information about the immediate environment.

Lidars, or light detection and ranging, use laser pulses to measure distances to objects and they are used, among other things, for autonomous vehicles. For a long time they were relatively large and they consumed a lot of energy, but more and more manufacturers are using micro-electromechanical systems, or mems mirrors for the parts, as Intel does with the RealSense LiDAR L515. By using tiny mirrors for scanning, the size and energy consumption of the lasers can be significantly reduced. For example, Intel uses an 860nm laser diode and the L515 consumes less than 3.5W.

The L515 combines its 61mm diameter with a height of 26mm and a weight of less than 100 grams. The lidar records more than 23 million depth pixels per second and has a range of 25 centimeters to 9 meters. The depth resolution is 1024×768 pixels at 30 fps.

Intel combines the information from the lidar with images from an RGB camera and an accelerometer and a gyroscope are also present. In addition, the RealSense product contains its own processor to process images, so that the processor of a host system can be unburdened.

With the RealSense LiDAR L515, Intel is targeting applications in healthcare, retail, logistics and robotics. The lidar can thus help with object recognition and measuring the size and distance of objects, among other things. The price of the L515 is $349. Users can leverage the existing RealSense SDK 2.0 to develop applications.