How a Depth Camera sees the World

A depth camera like the Intel Realsense® camera used on the Sharx Robotics Carter robot uses dual cameras like a pair of human eyes with some image processing to determine how far the items in the image are.

The colors you see in the depth image aren’t real but are representative of the distance of the objects. In the most common used set of colors, blue is close, red is far. The picture above is a composite of the depth camera image and a standard camera looking at the same scene, where a Sharx ReachR™ robot arm is about to pick up a beer can on the floor.