how to: Building PCL & laser_scan_matcher on Raspberry pi 2

edit

All,

I thought I would publish this "how to" to build pcl and related ros libraries on a raspberry pi with a view to running the laser_scan_matcher on a pi.

My motivation for this was because I found there were often timing issues when I ran the LSM on the host PC

So here goes:

Installing PCL on Raspberry Pi 2

System Set-up

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libflann-dev
sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev libvtk5-qt4-dev
sudo apt-get install gsl-bin libgsl0-dev

Ensure swap space is = 2Gb - some of the complilation of PCL uses up a lot of memory (In total takes about 24 hrs on raspberry Pi 2)

First we have to build PCL git clone https://github.com/PointCloudLibrary/... cd pcl

Edit cmake/pcl_find_sse.cmake and replace '-march=native' from line (approx) 10 with '-march=armv6 -mfloat-abi=hard -mfpu=vfp

Edit the files below and add this line before the definition is checked for

#define BOOST_LITTLE_ENDIAN

~/pcl/io/include/pcl/io/ply/byte_order.h
~/pcl/common/include/pcl/PCLPointCloud2.h

Then build pcl

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j1 (>j1 will fail and given the swap space usage uses up too much bandwidth)
sudo make install

Now we need to make the ros PCL libraries and the scan_tools package (Which includes laser_scan_matcher) into ros working dir (Assuming this is ros_ws)

pcl_conversions pcl_msgs perception_pcl scan_tools

cd ~/ros_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/ros-perception/pcl_conversions.git 
git clone https://github.com/ros-perception/pcl_msgs.git 
git clone https://github.com/ros-perception/perception_pcl.git 
git clone https://github.com/ccny-ros-pkg/scan_tools.git

Before kicking these off we need to set csm up CSM: csm is a part of the laser_scan_matcher can requires a couple of configs to be set first

git clone https://github.com/AndreaCensi/csm.git (I cloned this into a sub directory of scan_tools)

Build csm (catkin will do this but I just found it easier to check it build okay)

You can run the csm build script to do this

./install_quickstart.sh

Update PKG_CONFIG_PATH to include the path to csm.pc

In my case this was:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:/home/pi/ros_ws/src/scan_tools/csm/sm/pkg-config

Set up the csm headers - these didn't copy to the right location for me so I did it manually: cp -r ~/ros_ws/src/scan_tools/csm/deploy/include/ /home/pi/ros_ws/install/

Finally we're ready to make all the libraries So from top level

catkin_make

If there are problems I suggest building the pcl packaged first then csm and scan_matcher

Hope this finds a use.

Mark

PS thanks to @joq for the help with csm