velodyne_vlp16

Step 1: Setup your sensor

This wiki will guide you through the steps to setup Velodyne VLP 16 as your sensor. If you have a different LIDAR/sensor, the steps will be similar.

1. Setting up your computer to communicate with the Velodyne sensor
   1. Configure your computer’s IP address through the Gnome interface
   2. Connecting your computer to LIDAR through terminal
   3. Checking the configurations
2. Installing ROS dependencies
3. Installing the VLP16 driver
4. Viewing the Data
5. Troubleshooting

Step 2: Publish pointclouds to /filtered_cloud ROS topic

By default, the ROS node for the sensor will publish data on some default topic. For example, the Velodyne VLP 16 node discussed above will publish the point cloud data to: the /velodyne_points. You can easily remap the topics so that the data gets published on to the /filtered_cloud topic by using this line in your roslaunch file (VLP16_points.launch):

<remap from="velodyne_points" to="filtered_cloud"/>.

Visit this page for information on the remap tag. You can also use the commandline topic mapping like this:

rosrun sensor_pkg_name sensor_node_name velodyne_points:=filtered_cloud

Then follow the usage instructions on this repo to start tracking objects!

Additional info

1. Understanding ROS topics
2. Laser scans and point clouds in ROS; Converting laser scans to point clouds