How to update the ros driver for the Velodyne VLP-16

asked 2015-12-11 20:13:35 -0500

boyihu
21 ●1 ●1 ●3

Hey,

I am very new to the ROS and 3D LIDAR and today I got the Velodyne VLP-16 LIDAR from our group, somehow I can not let it working properly. Here is some detail description of my problem:

I am using ROS indigo. First we I did is to use the sample data in the flash drive and uses some ROS command ( http://www.pcl-users.org/Convert-pcap... ) to convert the data from .pcap to .pcd format in order to run some PCL functions. The sample data was from HDL32E LIDAR and I had no problem of this part since the velodyne_pointcloud folder has the 32e_points.launch file.

Next step, I saved a .pcap file from the VLP-16 LIDAR and wanted to repeat the same procedure. Somehow this time I could not make it working since there is no VLP16_points.launch file in the velodyne_pointcloud folder!!! Then I searched online and from Github I saw the newest folder of the Velodyne driver do include the VLP16_points.launch, so I wonder what procedure should I do to upgrade the Velodyne related files to the newest version?

Since I am really new to this area so all suggestions will be highly appreciated!

answered 2015-12-12 12:43:09 -0500

kmhallen
1411 ●13 ●19 ●35

There has not been an Indigo release of the Velodyne packages in over a year: https://github.com/ros-drivers/velody...

To get the newer features (VLP-16 support) you will have to compile from source. Clone the velodyne repository into your workspace. Then build your workspace with catkin_make.

http://wiki.ros.org/catkin/Tutorials/...

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Comments

That is correct. We are working on a new Indigo release that will include VLP-16 support and some other items, but it's not quite ready to go yet. Soon, I hope.