There are two different sensors that are being used that I have seen. One is the lidar and one is the kinect type sensor. There are some advantages to the kinect sensor over lidar. The kinect sensor is able to scan multiple heights at one time. The lidar can only do one height. The kinect type sensor can also return 3d image data, where the lidar is 2d.

That being said, the lidar returns less data to process and is the perferred first approach by most. It requires a less expensive computer to process the data (atom or arm sized processor). These are less power hungry which makes them better suited for robotics.

The lidar is a pretty inexpensive way to do this and they are very available. They also stand less of a chance to flood the communication channel.

Thanks Dave, lidar does seem like a more cost effective approach - until you look at the pricing of the 360 scanning versions. Holy! Kinect could never "really" easily connect to the ezb directly and would require a PC. Interesting though...

@richard, I certainly am not dissing the company - merely disappointed with the physical robot's design and specifications for the price. Given their impressive coding ability, I had high expectations. There's a philosophy with pricing - and believe it or not, it's a huge attribute to a products success. Many think product pricing is designed by calculating a desired markup - well, the answer is more complicated than that. For example, currently the robot is incredibly niche and therefore sells 1 per month. Now, imagine that robot cost $300 or $400 - they would sell 10/20 per month and make more revenue and profit, respectively. Also one important result of having a larger user base is feedback to strengthen the product which makes it more attractive to new customers. A small user base limited by pricing doesn't promote product growth and therefore isolates the feature-set to ones decided are important by the developers and not the consumers.

Many companies suffer from making the same decision - by focusing on what they feel is important and not what the consumer wants. Ezrobot's approach has been the opposite. When someone says "must be nice being the boss". My answer is "are you kidding, I have 25,000 bosses!"

Ezrobot doesn't make decisions for its users - it's been the other way around, including with pricing. Their pricing model doesn't present companies the option to partner with their product either - and that's hugely disappointing.

Their company and technology is indeed impressive - or at least must be for that price. It's the product pricing and specifications that I am disappointed with - not dissing. Disappointed. They are very different emotions

You can find the lidars for around $100 that do 360 degrees. The XV-11 is probably the most cost effective due to being mass produced.

Wow, the cheapest I thought was $400 on Robotshop, Dave you have to let us in on your sources

You can pick them up on ebay for $75 and up. Here is link to a Lidar and Teensy combo for $144
Lidar controller

https://www.getsurreal.com/shop

This is the place I go through. Shipping is a bit slow but everything has worked great that I have received. He is out of Dallas TX, which I visit a lot, so it is an easy pickup for me.

Any chance the EZB-v5 will have a full bidirectional interface to the Dynamixel AX-12 servos? Would be great for input to auto positioner. Also feedback on load of servos for feedback on grippers.

@RobertL184 You can do this, just put an inline ADC current draw meter in line with the servo and get the readout from an adc port. I won't get into details here that should work.