ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Working with point cloud to laser scan package

One of the important applications of 3D vision sensors is mimicking the functionalities of a laser scanner. We need the laser scanner data for working with autonomous navigation algorithms such as SLAM. We can make a fake laser scanner using a 3D vision sensor. We can take a slice of point cloud data/depth image and convert it to laser range data. In ROS, we have a set of packages to convert the point cloud to laser scans:

• depthimage_to_laserscan: This package contains nodes that take the depth image from the vision sensor and generate 2D laser scan based on the provided parameters. The input of the node are depth image and camera info parameters, which include calibration parameters. After ...