Interfacing Velodyne LIDAR in ROS

One of the trending areas in robotics is autonomous cars or driverless cars. One of the essential ingredients in this robot is a Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR). One of the commonly used LIDARs is Velodyne LIDAR. Velodyne LIDARs are used in Google driverless cars and also in most of the research in driver less cars. There are three models of Velodyne LIDAR available in the market. Following are the three models and their diagrams:

Velodyne HDL-64E, Velodyne HDL-32E, and Velodyne VLP-16/Puck.

Figure 17: Different series of Velodyne

Velodyne can interface to ROS and can generate point cloud data from its raw data. The link for the velodyne ROS package for model HDL-32E is http://wiki.ros.org/velodyne.

We can install the velodyne driver in Ubuntu using the following command:

• In Jade:

  $ sudo apt-get install ros-jade-velodyne
  

• In Indigo:

  $ sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-velodyne
  

After installing these packages, connect the LIDAR power supply and connect Ethernet...