Cover an angle range from -210 to -150 degrees for a laser scan
I have a sensor mounted in the rear of my mobile base, facing backwards. It creates a pointcloud and I am trying to create a fake laserscan using pointcloud_to_laserscan package.
The problem is that relative to base_footprint, I need the range from -210 until -150 degrees (the sensor has a horizontal field of view of 60 degrees, facing backwards) to be collapsed into a laserscan. Trying (transformed to rad of course)
min_angle: -210
max_angle: -150
and visualizing the data in rviz, it seems that only -180 until -150 is taken into consideration. When I use
min_angle: -180
max_angle: +180
It just works fine but I get a lot of useless points that cover areas that the sensor does not cover (thus getting the value Inf assigned).
The less data consuming alternative would be to create a second base_footprint_rotated that will be rotated by 180 degrees relative to base_footprint (around z axis) and use it as reference for defining the region of interest for the laserscan as
min_angle: -30
max_angle: +30
target_frame: base_footprint_rotated
Is there any other way for overcoming this limitation?
This may be a limitation of some components, but I'd be very surprised if this is true globally. There is no such limit. Angles (ambiguous) can be any value. Also: ROS standardised on quaternions, and this seems like something else.
I would say a limitaton for the laserscan min and max angle definition.
That makes more sense :). Would perhaps be nice to update your question?