npd Studio solves hardware puzzle behind next-generation smart city camera

A Lancashire product design and engineering consultancy has completed development of the hardware behind a new tri-sensor smart city camera capable of 99.7 per cent object classification accuracy at ranges of up to 200 metres.

npd Studio, based at Samlesbury, was brought in by Terminus Technologies to solve a problem the tech company had been unable to crack alone: how to package a LiDAR module, thermal sensor, optical camera, and Nvidia Jetson edge processor into a single weatherproof enclosure without active cooling.

Terminus had already built a sensor fusion and AI perception platform capable of extracting more than 100 data points per object in real time. The software worked, the components were specified, but the company had no way of getting the technology into a physical product that could survive outdoor deployment.

Nathan Partington founder and CEO of npd, said: "They had genuinely clever technology, but no way of getting it out of the lab and into the real world. Our job was turning that into something real, something you could actually put outside and trust to work. That meant thinking about heat, weatherproofing, how it all fits together, how it's manufactured - every surface, every material choice, every angle had a job to do."

The resulting device, SafeSight Outdoor, fuses LiDAR, thermal, and optical sensor data in real time from a single all-weather housing, achieving sub-centimetre spatial accuracy alongside its 200m detection range.

npd's design and engineering team led the project end-to-end - industrial design, mechanical engineering, electronics integration, prototyping, and manufacturing readiness - using in-house rapid prototyping to test geometry and thermal performance before moving to a high-fidelity functional prototype built with external manufacturing partners.

Passive cooling proved the central engineering challenge. With three separate sensor systems and an onboard processor sharing one enclosure, every surface, angle, and material choice had to manage heat dissipation as well as house the components, without compromising the unit's weatherproofing.

The camera is built for deployment across smart city, airport, and stadium environments.