RealSense uses projected IR and thus doesn't work outdoors.

(edit: because short-range and little ambient IR are required)

Except the end of that video shows it working in a forest... https://youtu.be/Us0BqJvsF9k?t=6m14s

OK, that's cool. I stand corrected. Clearly it can work outdoors in some circumstances. IR texture projectors get washed out by ambient IR from the sun. Thus the choice of a shady forest for the very nice demo. People have also used Kinect outdoors in the evening, etc.

But in the general case you can't rely on this approach because sun.

> because sun.

That's a fair point. So RealSense will probably work at night, in a shady forest (like the demo) or maybe the shady side of a mountain, but as soon as the sun is involved IR becomes unusable. I don't suppose you could switch the other side of the visible spectrum and do UV cameras, could you? Having your data reduced to one dimension per pixel really makes the AI easier.

There's a lot of UV in sunlight too. Hence sunscreen. Many birds can see it. Some birds have patterns on them that are only visible in UV. Fun facts.

Thanks for the tip. Are there any portable technology that would work outdoors ?

Vision works for animals, and a lot of people are working very hard to do it for computers. Google "UAV visual SLAM" for examples.

LIDAR works already but is heavy, power hungry and expensive. Not good for these small vehicles.

Yeah, I pictures a Google Drone laughing.

stereo vision, structure from motion, animals use both

Now shipping in mobile phone size - http://www.pcworld.com/article/2907352/intel-shrinks-realsen...

Shame the dev kit only has Windows support.

Confirms my thoughts, it really is a miniature Kinect-like kit.