ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Point Clouds

Point clouds appeared in the robotics toolbox as a way to intuitively represent and manipulate the information provided by 3D sensors, such as time-of-flight cameras and laser scanners, in which space is sampled in a finite set of points in a 3D frame of reference. The Point Cloud Library (PCL) provides a number of data types and data structures to easily represent not only the points of our sampled space, but also the different properties of the sampled space, such as color and normal vectors. PCL also provides a number of state-of-the-art algorithms to perform data processing on our data samples, such as filtering, model estimation, and surface reconstruction.

ROS provides a message-based interface through which PCL point clouds ...