Interfacing Velodyne sensors with ROS

We have seen how to simulate a Velodyne sensor; now let's have a look at how we can interface a real Velodyne sensor with ROS.

The following commands are to install the velodyne ROS driver package to convert Velodyne data to point cloud data.

ROS Kinetic:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-velodyne

ROS Indigo:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-velodyne

These commands will install the ROS Velodyne driver and point cloud converter packages.

This driver supports models such as the HDL-64E, HDL-32E, and VLP-16.

Here are the commands to start the driver nodelets:

$ roslaunch velodyne_driver nodelet_manager.launch model:=32E

Here, you need to mention the model name along with the launch file to start the driver for a specific model.

The following command will start the converter nodelets to convert Velodyne messages (velodyne_msgs/VelodyneScan) to a point cloud (sensor_msgs/PointCloud2). Here is the command to perform this conversion:

$ roslaunch velodyne_pointcloud...