The Orbbec Femto Bolt is a RGBD camera based on the Microsoft Azure Kinect DK. Looky here:
Introduction
Late in 2023, Microsoft announced that they would no longer be producing Kinect hardware. Instead, Microsoft began licensing their Kinect technology to approved third-party manufacturers. Here we are looking at the Orbbec Femto Bolt, which is an Azure Kinect DK design.
There are currently three cameras in the Orbbec Femto line. There’s the Bolt, which we are looking at here, and two Femto Megas. The Megas have a Jetson Nano module built-in to preprocess the video. The difference between the two Megas is the enclosure type.
Here’s a neat exploded view of the Bolt:
You can see the RGB camera towards the left of the enclosure, and the depth sensing IR emitter and camera towards the right side. The RGB camera is 4K HDR and provides a good image even in low light conditions. The Time of Flight (ToF) Depth Imager is 1 Megapixel. The enclosure is made from aluminum and has a solid build quality.
The camera is shipped with a power supply (which you many need from time to time depending on how much power stress you have on your Jetson system) and a 1.5-meter USB 3 cable. The cable has an A connector on one side, and a USB C connector on the other. Terminal screws are part of the USB C connector, handy to keep the connector attached to the camera.
The Femto Bolt supports a wide range of platforms, including Macintosh, Linux, Windows, and Android. It is a UVC camera, and there is software support for the ARM64 Jetson too. The Femto Bolt works with all the Jetson models. The Jetson is in the video is a NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin Development Kit. Since most of the processing is done on the camera, every other Jetson should get close to the same results. I found the Femto Bolt to be exceptionally well documented.
Orbbec SDK
The Orbbec SDK is a mature software platform for working with the Femto Bolt. You can interface with the Bolt using the standard C and C++ SDKs. There is a Python SDK too. There are libraries for interfacing the Bolt with ROS, ROS 2 and Unity. You shouldn’t have many issues including the camera in your project!
Also note that the camera is compatible with the Azure Kinect software. Because the Kinect has been around for almost 15 years, there are a lot of projects that you can use to boostrap your application.
ROS 2 and Jetson
One of the popular use cases for the Jetson is to use an RGBD camera with ROS. There are SDKs supporting ROS and ROS 2. I made up a Docker file as an example on how to use ROS 2 and the Bolt on the Jetson. You can use this sample to help create a Dockerfile for your own configuration. The femto-ros2 repository is on the JetsonHacks Github account.
Conclusion
The Femto Bolt is a nice camera suited towards indoor use. Because the technology is mature, there are lots of examples of people using Kinects in a wide variety of applications. However, just because the technology is mature doesn’t mean that the specifications are lagging behind. The 4K HDR RGB camera provides a very good image, and the 120-degree field of view means that it can monitor quite a wide area. Certainly worth checking out.