How to filter robot's footprint from a pointcloud
I have a laser scanner on a rotating head that I will use to generate a point cloud. The only problem is that the orientation and scan angles of the lidar are such that the back of the robot will show up in the scans. I would like to remove any points that are within the robot's footprint from the pointcloud that is generated by laser_assembler.
I have tried using the PointCloudFootprintFilter included in the laser_filters package, and am running it exactly as their example shows, with the my_cloud_config.yaml looking like so:
cloud_filter_chain:
- type: PointCloudFootprintFilter
name: footprint_filter
params:
inscribed_radius: 0.325
[ERROR] [1405092386.043561371]: Couldn't find filter of type PointCloudFootprintFilter
I also tried it using the PR2PointCloudFootprintFilter that is shown in their examples, but I get the same issue.
Running "rospack plugins --attrib=plugin filters" yields the following:
laser_filters /opt/ros/hydro/share/laser_filters/laser_filters_plugins.xml
filters /opt/ros/hydro/share/filters/default_plugins.xml
Any suggestion on how I can get the laser_filters to work, or if there is another way to acheive the same affect? I know that pcl has some filter nodelets like PassThrough, but I couldn't find anything that does the same as their CropBox function.