Stereolabs ZED X Nano — Wrist-Mount GMSL2 Stereo Camera for Robotic Manipulation

Specifications

Overview

The ZED X Nano is Stereolabs' wrist-mount stereo camera, released under Ouster's Stereolabs brand for robotic manipulation, humanoids and Physical AI data collection. At 42 x 30.5 x 33.8 mm and 75 g it is roughly 40% smaller than comparable close-range depth cameras, which lets it be mounted directly on a robotic wrist or end effector without altering the arm's dynamics — the configuration needed for pick-and-place, item picking and in-hand inspection.

Rather than a fixed geometric stereo pipeline, the camera pairs dual 2.3 MP global shutter sensors with a Neural Depth Engine that uses learned models to produce depth with sub-millimetre Z-axis accuracy at 3 cm to 2 m. Global shutter removes motion artefacts during fast manipulation, and zero-copy capture moves frames from sensor to GPU without a host memory copy, keeping the latency budget short enough for closed-loop control. An 18 mm baseline sets the near-range sweet spot at 5-150 cm.

The interface is GMSL2 over FAKRA-Z coax with power over coax, so the camera connects to NVIDIA Jetson Orin or Xavier hosts through a ZED Link capture card with hardware synchronisation and external triggering for multi-camera rigs. A vibration-hardened 6-axis IMU running at 200 Hz feeds visual-inertial SLAM with pose updates to 120 Hz. Software support covers the ZED SDK, ROS and ROS 2, Isaac ROS, Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab, so teams capturing demonstrations for imitation learning can train in simulation with a matched camera model and deploy to the same sensor.

Key Benefits

Wrist-mount form factor at 75 g and 42 x 30.5 x 33.8 mm, small enough for humanoid hands and end effectors. Neural Depth Engine for sub-millimetre depth accuracy where geometric stereo struggles. Global shutter at up to 120 fps for fast manipulation without rolling-shutter skew. Zero-copy sensor-to-GPU capture to keep closed-loop control latency low. Sim-to-real parity with native Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab integration plus matched camera models. Multi-camera synchronisation over GMSL2 for stereo rigs and multi-view capture. Hardened for robotics with a vibration-hardened IMU and 24/7 operation certification.

Applications

Robotic manipulation, pick-and-place and in-hand inspection. Item picking, depalletisation and kitting. Humanoid hands and wrist-mounted perception. Physical AI demonstration capture for imitation and reinforcement learning. Close-range 3D perception where depth cost and size dominate. Sim-to-real transfer pipelines built on Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab. Quality inspection at the end effector.

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