Raycasting to generate lidar pointcloud
Does anyone know of a ROS2 library available to generate pointcloud data from a 3d mesh?
I am working on an undergrad thesis project to identify the position of a known object in space using a lidar. The method I am using must generate pointcloud data from a model (probably .obj) and iterate over potential positions of the object. I thought about writing my own raycaster, but this is not the crux of my thesis and I would prefer not to reinvent the wheel.
I have been unable to find a ROS2 library that raycasts, but I imagine it exists. In lieu of a ROS2 package, Open3d has a brilliant library of tools that would be suitable for this task (albeit overkill) and I have built open3d from source, but I am struggling to get a ROS2 package working that uses open3d library. Specifically, the test package I'm trying is here https://github.com/ros-perception/per...
I supppose there are two parts to this question. If I use open3d, how can I include the external library in my ros2 pkg? Is this practice okay, or should I only be looking at libraries that are already integrated with ROS2.
Other tidbits of information are that I am using is ROS2 foxy on Ubuntu 20.04.
