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Yeah, you're in some trouble, but there may be ways to get around it. It's going to degrade your localization and map quality, however. Which sticks because you have an expensive lidar.

All of the commonly used ROS SLAM libraries are going to require horizontal scanners. Karto, Gmapping, Slam Toolbox, Hector. What you can do though is:

  • Find the beam that is closest to horizontal from your measurements
  • As the lidar sweeps, storing the encoder information about its angle and range
  • Assemble a pseudo-laser-scan from that information.

You're going to incur error from at least your encoder and mounting mechanisms, and any vibration. As long as the sweeping is sufficiently fast (which, from looking at it, I can't tell) and you move very, very slow, you should be OK. This is obviously suboptimal.

Your other options are 3D SLAM, but you're hitting the edges of open source and entering the land of research and questionable documentation. Options there that may be worth considering:

  • Cartographer, but I have no idea if it'll accept this. It usually expects a 3D lidar or a tilting lidar not a sweep.
  • A variant on LOAM