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Welcome to ROS Answers, Alkaros!

After reading through your question I believe the point cloud is actually what you are looking for. There is already an application in the turtlebot_follower package, which does something similar to what you are trying to achieve. It uses the point cloud generated by the 3D sensor - RViz is not creating the pointcloud, but only visualising it - to track peoples legs in order to follow them. For this the depth information of the point cloud is used.

However, if for other reasons you like to use depth information only, then you should look at the /camera/depth/image_raw topic. Through it you can receive the depth data of the 3D sensor as an image stream.

Hope this helps!

Welcome to ROS Answers, Alkaros!

After reading through your question I believe the point cloud is actually what you are looking for. There is already an application in the turtlebot_follower package, which does something similar to what you are trying to achieve. It uses the point cloud generated by the 3D sensor - RViz is not creating the pointcloud, but only visualising it - to track peoples legs in order to follow them. For this the depth information of the point cloud is used.

However, if for other reasons you like to use depth information only, then you should look at the /camera/depth/image_raw ROS topic. Through it you can receive the depth data of the 3D sensor as an image stream.

Hope this helps!