Limelight, Hailo introduce Limelight 4 smart camera at CES 2025

With a mission to promote STEM studies and make it easier than ever to develop advanced vision-based robots, Limelight Vision recently introduced its low-code Limelight 4 smart camera in collaboration with edge AI processor maker Hailo.

The Limelight products are complete with a software interface which the company said can enable anyone of nearly any age to simply and easily add AI-enabled vision pipelines to their robots.

“To achieve Limelight’s goal of making robotics easy, we’ve prioritized marrying powerful hardware with easy-to-use, well-supported software,” said Brandon Hjelstrom, Limelight Vision founder. “Our partnership with Hailo works as well as it does because Hailo too shares in this vision - Hailo-8 is an incredibly powerful and advanced AI accelerator, and it comes with the very best software support in the market today.”

Low-code camera runs on Raspberry Pi CM5

The Limelight 4 platform is designed to be easy to use for individuals with no or limited coding experience, yet powerful enough for more sophisticated robotic projects and products.

"Limelight 4 removes the barriers of technological anxiety and expertise, enabling anyone to build vision-based robots with minimal code," Hjelstrom said. "Web developers have thousands of tools and abstractions that make their work as straightforward as it can possibly be. Robotics engineers, comparatively, are on their own. By making robotics engineering simpler, we'll inspire more people to build the robots of tomorrow."

The Limelight 4 is powered by the Raspberry Pi CM5 and includes 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. It features an OV9281 monochrome global shutter and IMX462 back-illuminated color sensor options, built-in IMU, and a 3.5V-30V input voltage range. Language support includes C++, Python, C#, and Java.

Hailo-8 AI accelerator enables perception, fiducial localization

Empowered by the Hailo-8 AI accelerator with a compute power of 26 Tera Operations per Second (TOPS), Limelight 4 can equip any robot with advanced AI capabilities enabling a range of real-time perception tasks such as people and object detection, 3D robot localization, image segmentation, and more.

The Limelight 4 was showcased at CES 2025 in Hailo’s Venetian Suite, demonstrating its Hailo-accelerated, low-code vision pipeline for 3D robot localization with AprilTags fiducial tags and IMU Fusion.

The compute power enabled by the Hailo-8 accelerators ranges from 13 TOPS for the Hailo-8L, designed for entry-level AI applications, all the way to 200 TOPS for the high-performance Century PCIe card.

Limelight 4 will be available for FIRST 2025

Limelight 4 cameras will be made available to participants in the FIRST 2025 robotics competition. Founded in 1989, FIRST is a global nonprofit organization that prepares young people for the future through a series of team-based robotics competitions held across the U.S. and globally.

“STEM education and robotics are the cornerstones of fostering future innovation,” said Orr Danon, Hailo CEO and co-founder. “For Hailo, investing in STEM education and empowering young minds through hands-on experience is the means to nurture the next generation of scientists and entrepreneurs. This is why our engineers volunteer to support FIRST robotics teams. Our collaboration with Limelight further democratizes access to transformative technologies, making the use of advanced AI capabilities more accessible to everyone.”

Limelight was selected as the exclusive provider of robot cameras and controllers for the FIRST 2025 robotics competition.