migrating a Sensor plugin

[osrf-migration]

Original report (archived issue) by Felipe Inostroza (Bitbucket: Felipe Inostroza).

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Hello,

I am trying to migrate a sensor plug-in that:

Takes sensor output from a gpulidar, and filters (removes) some of the points.

From the migration tutorial it says that this should be a “standalone program”, however then I don’t know how to access the sdf configuration of the sensor. And if I set it to be a system plug in I don’t know how to access the sensor data (and my callback will be executed at every physics iteration, instead of at every sensor update?).

How should I do this?

Sorry if this is not the place to ask questions but I cant find where that would be.

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Thanks!

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[osrf-migration]

Original comment by Felipe Inostroza (Bitbucket: Felipe Inostroza).

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• Edited issue description

[chapulina]

From the migration tutorial it says that this should be a “standalone program"

I believe you're referring to this tutorial, right? What that means is that the main way to get sensor data at the moment is by subscribing to sensor messages from any executable. Here's a subscriber example.

Sorry if this is not the place to ask questions but I cant find where that would be.

Usually questions should go to https://answers.gazebosim.org, but I think you raise a good point about a missing feature, so let's keep this issue alive.

I am trying to migrate a sensor plug-in that: Takes sensor output from a gpulidar, and filters (removes) some of the points.

You can do that with the executable that I linked above. But there are some caveats:

• If you're applying noise to the data, you can only get the post-noise data.
• You can only get the data asynchronously. This can complicate things if timing is very important to your application.

The team has discussed the possibility of exposing sensor data through components so that systems could access it synchronously and before noise. For that to work, we may need some new APIs on ign-sensors.

I'll leave this issue open until we address the 2 caveats above. The implementation may be through components as suggested or some other way.