What's the difference between Astra, Astra S, Astra Pro

Technical Support & Q&A Basic
1

The indiegogo Astra campaign ($99) mentions 3 models, what are the differences/specs ?

Thank you
Tiago

2

Hi, Tiago,

  1. Orbbec Astra is a general purpose 3D sensor that could fit various applications.
  2. Orbbec Astra S is specially calibrated for short range 3D scanning.
  3. Orbbec Astra Pro is similar to Astra in depth but has a high quality UVC RGB camera. This camera can stream 720P RGB stream @ 30 FPS. The UVC camera can also be used as a webcam. You may want to use it in immersive products that need to show high quality RGB video.

The applications of these camera I mentioned are not locked at all. You may choose which ever you want to use based on your needs. In addition, Astra/Astra S has good compatibility with OpenNI 2. But for Astra Pro, I strongly suggest you use our SDK :grin:

1 Like
3

What is the minimal distance for this camera?

4

The minimum distance of Astra S is about 0.3 meter :smile:

5

Thanks. Can you tell a bit about the reasons to chose this distance? If I place the camera on top of a screen to record gestures, then I’ll be often within 30cm to the screen.

6

Controlling a monitor or small screen with gesture looks amazing. But we cannot see much advantage of such short range gesture control over touch screens. So our Astra is generally designed for large screen gesture control.

The other two reasons are:

  • Statistic data of existing 3D sensors;
  • Resource limitation (we need the support from our good customers to release more products)

BTW, we don’t have any technical difficulty in release 10cm ultra short range sensors. As long as we found a increment desire and, gather enough resource, we will try to more forward.

7

“As long as we found a increment desire and, gather enough resource, we will try to more forward.”

The desire is huge! I’m a roboticist and the kinect 1 had a huge impact on the research community. Every robot had at least one Kinect to see the world and the objects it wants to grasp. Especially for grasping, a short ranged 3d camera is extremely useful.
Many industrial and research teams would probably integrate your system into the endeffectors to have an intelligent gripper and as you also provide some CPU and GPU, vision algorithms could be implemented directly within the camera and so removing the need to drag the data to a central PC.

8

2 posts were split to a new topic: Is it possible to use OpenNI with the Astra Pro?

9

Thanks for the feedback and the hints :smile: I put a note to our HW R&D team. So they will take this potential market into serious consideration.

10

If not identical can you please detail “similar”?
What are the differences?