The Zivid 2+ M130 is the first machine vision 3D camera in the latest Zivid 2+ portfolio and is set to fundamentally change automation in the world of e-commerce order fulfillment by offering high-reliability piece picking across millions of inventory SKUs.

he high-speed and demanding world of e-commerce has been at the vanguard of robotic automation deployment for many years. Modern fulfillment centers are alive with automated transport of thousands, or in some cases millions of SKUs (stock keeping units). Whilst automation thrived in these centers, one stubborn problem has remained: reliable order picking of all these items.

Take a moment to think about the immense inventory variation: shapes, colors, sizes, and the nemesis of 3D vision thus far; transparent objects, wrapping, and polybags. These items have proved to be a major hurdle in e-commerce automation. To date, machine vision fails to cope with these challenging objects with any degree of assuredness or speed. Consequently, pick and place robot cells are left to address what can only be considered ‘the easy to pick stuff’, which is a very small portion of the items a fulfillment center handles daily. Because of this, the majority of item picking is still entrusted to human operators.
Zivid 2+ addresses the demands of high-mix SKU piece picking in one package with its state-of-the-art hardware capabilities. It expands the horizons of 3D vision and enables what was previously considered impossible to do. The Zivid 2+ is one camera for all piece picking needs; object recognition, segmentation, pose estimation, and collision checking. This enables the robot to pick and pack any object swiftly and reliably, without damage.
Transparent and highly reflective items have proved notoriously difficult to consistently image with 3D machine vision systems and have stood as an unresolvable challenge across the automation community. Plastic bottles, items that are packaged in poly bags, bubble wrap, or other transparent containers comprise a significant part of the inventory in an e-commerce fulfillment center.

The Zivid 2+ now brings innovative 3D technology, called Omni Engine, to unveil transparent objects through the reimagination of what’s possible with temporal structured light.

The path to solving transparency also proved integral to making vast improvements in the imaging of highly reflective objects commonly found in manufacturing. It doesn’t stop there though, Zivid 2+ also shows better performance on matte dark materials with more robustness against ambient light, giving the user more performance out of a faster capture time. This new technology is capable of capturing a bin filled with shiny, transparent, and dark materials together in one go.