Convert LiDAR scans to Point Cloud

Introduction

In order to view large amounts of laser data in context, it is necessary to concatenate the scans into a point cloud. ROS has tools to do this.

Running ROS Bags

roscore
rviz
roslaunch gravl laser_to_pc.launch
rosbag play 180424test1.bag --clock 

Links

• TheConstructSim ROS Q&A page (link)
• laser_assembler ROS package (link)
• ROS Answers rosbag play (link)
• Python PointCloud2 library (link)
• PCL (seems like opencv but for point clouds) link
• PCL with ros link

Troubleshooting

1. Running roslaunch file roslaunch gravl localization.launch returns error:

ERROR: cannot launch node of type [gravl/const_vel_tf.py]: can't locate node [const_vel_tf.py] in package [gravl]

Answer: (link)