ros-drivers / velodyne

ROS support for Velodyne 3D LIDARs
http://ros.org/wiki/velodyne
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add publishing of laser beam visualization markers #509

Open mantkiew opened 1 year ago

mantkiew commented 1 year ago

It is useful to be able to see the lidar beams in RViz. This PR adds publishing of RViz markers for all lidar beams according to the lidar's calibration parameters and range. We have used this functionality to validate dual lidar design on University of Waterloo's UW Moose with VLS-128 on top and VLP32-C on 10-degree angle:

lidar-frames-10-deg-close

ground_lidar-10-deg

Details:

The example images were produced using the following commands

<launch transform publishers and robot URDF publisher>
$ rviz
$ roslaunch velodyne_pointcloud VLS128_points.launch frame_id:=lidar
<CTRL+C>
$ roslaunch velodyne_pointcloud VLP-32C_points.launch frame_id:=ground_lidar
<CTRL+C>
JWhitleyWork commented 1 year ago

While I think this could be useful, having it enabled by default is definitely not desirable. Please add a parameter to enable the feature, have the parameter default to False, and wrap the creation of the markers in an if.