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

From source

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

Make sure you have git installed:

sudo apt-get install git-core

Download the stack from our repository:

git clone https://github.com/ccny-ros-pkg/scan_tools.git

Install any dependencies using rosdep.

rosdep install scan_tools

Compile your catkin workspace from its root folder (eg. ~/catkin_ws):

catkin_make

Finally, source the information from your catkin workspace (or add it to your ~/.bashrc)

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.