ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Creating point clouds

In this first example, the reader will learn how to create PCL point clouds composed solely of pseudorandom points. The PCL point clouds will then be published periodically through a topic named /pcl_output. This example provides practical knowledge on how to generate point clouds with custom data and how to convert them to the corresponding ROS message type in order to broadcast point clouds to subscribers. The source code for this first example can be found in the chapter10_tutorials/src folder, and it is named pcl_create.cpp:

#include <ros/ros.h> #include <pcl/point_cloud.h> #include <pcl_conversions/pcl_conversions.h> #include <sensor_msgs/PointCloud2.h> main (int argc, char **argv) { ros::init (argc, argv, "pcl_create"); ...