Why is the market for 3D machine vision cameras growing so fast?

1794-ACN15 From a long-term perspective, the key factor driving the high growth of the 3D camera market is that the price of all 3D camera types is expected to decline. This allows customers to apply 3D cameras to system upgrades, replacing slower and less accurate 2D systems. In robotics in particular, we expect to see strong growth in 3D cameras, as a single 3D camera can perform the same tasks as multiple 2D cameras, making robots work faster and production lines more compact.

In addition, as the 3D camera market continues to grow, there will be more new vendors entering the market every year, which will lead to price competition, resulting in lower product prices, which will enable more customers to adopt 3D vision systems. In China, manufacturers usually sell their products at a lower price to achieve the substitution of imported products, which makes the price competition particularly fierce, but also lowers the customer access barrier, driving the long-term growth of the market.

1794-ACN15 The growth of the 3D machine vision market is particularly significant in autonomous driving and bin grabbing application scenarios. In our forecast, these two categories of machine vision applications will have the highest CAGR thanks to 3D camera applications. Autonomous driving, especially in the field of mobile robots, is growing very fast, and vendors are increasingly adopting solutions that integrate one or more 3D cameras to navigate the robot. According to Interact Analysis’s research on the mobile robot and robot picking application markets, these two markets have high growth certainty in the next few years, so correspondingly, machine vision will also grow significantly in these two areas.

Bin grabbing, palletizing, and unpalletizing are also major growth areas for 3D machine vision cameras. The continued growth in sales of picking robots is driving the rapid expansion of the 3D camera market.

1794-ACN15 From 2023 to 2028, the machine vision market for autonomous driving and bin picking applications is expected to grow at a CAGR of 20.8% and 19.2%, respectively.

New developments in the 3D machine vision market

More and more new 3D camera products are entering the market, and here are some new products to watch in the near future.

Photoneo: MotionCam 3D

1794-ACN15 Known for its 3D image acquisition, the camera uses parallel structured light technology for motion scanning at speeds of up to 40m/s, with high-resolution and blurry free images.

Lucid Vision: Helios2 Ray

Lucid Vision Labs recently released a new time-of-flight camera called Helios2 Ray, which has a resolution of 0.3 Mpixel, a range of 8.3 m, and a frame rate of 30 fps. The camera has four laser diodes that generate 3D point clouds in real time and works even in sunlight.

Orbecc: Gemini 2 XL

Orbecc has introduced the Gemini 2 XL stereo vision 3D camera, designed for demanding lighting conditions. It is capable of measuring depths from 0.4m to 20m and capturing frame rates up to 20 fps. The camera is primarily used in robotics and AI-based vision systems.