Revision history [back]

In my experience, this will come down mainly to price and skill.

3d lidars are vastly more expensive. 2d laser scanners aren't cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but i did see some japanese ones starting at 700$ (don't know the name unfortunately). Also, 3d slam is a lot harder to implement correctly - and efficiently - than SLAM with a 2d lidar like SICK.

If you only want to learn, scanning distance, accuracy and speed shouldn't really be your concern. Modern lidars are very fast in general, and accuracy shouldn't be that big of an issue. The resulting map may be a little imprecise, but the algorithm you'll write will work with any other Laserscanner supported by ROS. So you can always upgrade.

What kind of computer will you be running? By default ROS handles everything on the CPU. Handling laserdata on the GPU should be possible, but implementing anything really in e.g. CUDA is no easy task.

Just my two cents