Laser scan tools for ROS

Overview

Laser scan processing tools. The meta-package contains:

• laser_ortho_projector: calculates orthogonal projections of LaserScan messages

• laser_scan_matcher: an incremental laser scan matcher, using Andrea Censi's Canonical Scan Matcher implementation. It downloads and installs Andrea Censi's Canonical Scan Matcher [1] locally.

• laser_scan_sparsifier: takes in a LaserScan message and sparsifies it

• laser_scan_splitter: takes in a LaserScan message and splits it into a number of other LaserScan messages

• ncd_parser: reads in .alog data files from the New College Dataset [2] and broadcasts scan and odometry messages to ROS.

• scan_to_cloud_converter: converts LaserScan to PointCloud messages.

Installing

Prerequisite

• ROS is installed
  • 1-liner ROS Indigo installation on Ubuntu
• apt-get install python-wstool

From binary (RECOMMENDED)

apt-get install ros-%ROS_DISTRO%-scan-tools

apt-get install ros-indigo-scan-tools        (Indigo)

From source

Following is an example with ROS Indigo.

1. Create a catkin workspace and navigate to its source directory (e.g. ~/catkin_ws/src).

2. In your Catkin workspace, download source and build with the following commands.

cd ~/catkin_ws
wstool init src
wstool merge -t src https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ccny-ros-pkg/scan_tools/indigo/.rosinstall
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro indigo -r -y
catkin_make                (or any build commands available in ROS, e.g. `catkin build`)
source devel/setup.bash

More info

http://wiki.ros.org/scan_tools

References

[1] A. Censi, "An ICP variant using a point-to-line metric" Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2008

[2] M. Smith, I. Baldwin, W. Churchill, R. Paul, and P. Newman, The new college vision and laser data set, International Journal for Robotics Research (IJRR), vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 595599, May 2009.