ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

The PCL interface for ROS

The PCL interface for ROS provides the means required to communicate PCL data structures through the message-based communication system provided by ROS. To do so, there are several message types defined to hold point clouds as well as other data products from the PCL algorithms. In combination with these message types, a set of conversion functions are also provided to convert from native PCL data types to messages.

Some of the most useful message types are the following:

• std_msgs::Header: This is not really a message type, but it is usually part of every ROS message; it holds the information about when the message was sent as well a sequence number and the frame name. The PCL equivalent is pcl::Header type.
• sensor_msgs::PointCloud2 ...