Evaluation of Depth Sensors for Robotic Applications

The sensors that acquire 3D data play an important role in many applications. In addition, they have been used in the robotic field for several purposes, for instance, enhancing the navigation of mobile robots, object detection, scene reconstruction, 3D inspection of parts and others. Moreover, a significant amount of devices with distinct cost, accuracy and features have been released in the recent years which increases the difficulty of comparing each sensor in a proper manner or choosing the most suitable device for a specific task and operation field. This paper compares the Kinect v1, Kinect v2, Structure Sensor and Mesa Imaging SR4000. The noise of each sensor is characterized for different distances and considering objects with different colors. Therefore, this paper proposes a simple but quantitative benchmark for evaluating 3D devices that characterizes the most relevant features for the robotic field and in accordance with different type of operations.