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Hi Jimbo,

You don't necessarily need to make a pointcloud, although there's nothing stopping you. I made this a while ago: https://sites.google.com/site/mechatronicsguy/turquoisebot/laser-nodder Although I haven't posted the code, sorry, and I'm in Germany at the moment for ICRA.

All the arduino code does is publish a transform between /base_link and /laser that gives the current rotation of the laser. There's also a bit of code to accept requests to start or stop nodding the laser, but that's optoinal. Once the TFs are being published RVIZ can then display the scan immediately with no further configuration.

One snag I noticed is that although AMCL does read the TF between odom and laser, it only does it once on startup, hence it's not suitable for nodding lasers. Transforming to a pointcloud referenced to /base_link would be a good way around that, though.

Cheers, Gavin