Im sure cost is also a big factor.
Endgame is a small VERY CHEAP design that can be integrated with CMOS camera silicon.
Just like FLIR. They started with big expensive uncooled bolometers that required analog amplification (+1 chip), digitization (+1 chip) and processing (+1 more chip), and ended up producing all in one Lepton chip that interfaces using MIPI like every cellphone camera. They went from sensor + 2 analog chips + fpga to one small piece of silicon.
After all Google wants every android phone of the future to be able to do this. This means making every manufacturer buy additional hardware. It needs to be cheap and easy to use.
In the end Tango will probably be a licensed core that camera manufacturers can integrate into their own designs. One camera that does vision _and_ maps environment on the side.
given that ETH is on Tango and that page also mentions SuiteSparse (also used for Google autonomous cars), it could be the case that Tango is based on Structure from Motion.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 56.6 ms ] threadhttp://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/aerial-robots/au...
Sounds like it might be similar to the Nexus 7 form factor, and slightly larger than the device you've linked to.
It's not LIDAR, nor Stereo-camera or Kinect 1 tech (infrared laser combined with a monochrome CMOS).
Does it use time-of-flight camera (like Kinect 2) or structure-from-motion (like MS Photosynth, ETH Zurich app)?
Tango uses this special processor (so structure-from-motion could be possible, as well as time-of-flight):
-- http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/20/inside-the-revolutionary-3d...The Wikipedia article is still a stub: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Tango
Tango has a Primesense structured light system, a structure-from-motion coprocessor (or two) and a special depth sensing rear camera (IIRC).
So Google is using ETH's structure from motion technology (see comment below).
Looks like Movidius started out as a mobile GPU in 2005/2008 :o ... and ended up being general purpose vector coprocessor / DSP
http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc23/...
50Gflops/W in 65nm. Adapteva Epiphany http://www.parallella.org did 25 at 65nm, does 70Gflops/W in 28nm. Movidius projected 450Gflops/W at 28nm :o
Just like FLIR. They started with big expensive uncooled bolometers that required analog amplification (+1 chip), digitization (+1 chip) and processing (+1 more chip), and ended up producing all in one Lepton chip that interfaces using MIPI like every cellphone camera. They went from sensor + 2 analog chips + fpga to one small piece of silicon.
After all Google wants every android phone of the future to be able to do this. This means making every manufacturer buy additional hardware. It needs to be cheap and easy to use.
In the end Tango will probably be a licensed core that camera manufacturers can integrate into their own designs. One camera that does vision _and_ maps environment on the side.
given that ETH is on Tango and that page also mentions SuiteSparse (also used for Google autonomous cars), it could be the case that Tango is based on Structure from Motion.
http://www.cise.ufl.edu/research/sparse/SuiteSparse/
another related page is still up: http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/acohen/papers/symmetryBA.php