Hi Rene,

It might be worth adding a link to this driver on the
http://www.ros.org/laser_drivers page. What do you think?

Blaise

On Mon, 2010-07-05 at 18:36 +0200, René Wagner wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've ported a driver for the Leuze rotoScan ROD-4 family [1] of laser
> rangefinders originally developed as part of my thesis [2] from my own
> IPC library over to ROS.
> 
> The driver is provided by the rod4_node package in the
> dfki_sscs_laser_drivers stack. While we are still evaluating repository
> hosting options internally, the stack is available from here:
> 
> http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~rwagner/ros/dfki_sscs_laser_drivers-0.1.0.tar.bz2
> 
> The rod4_node driver currently supports ROD-4 models connected via
> Ethernet only, but could be extended to interface with RS422 models. The
> underlying network protocol implementation has been stable for more than
> a year now. All testing has been done with a "ROD4 plus" unit. The
> ROS-specific code was developed against ROS "latest".
> 
> Documentation is a bit scarce at the moment. rod4_node takes only two
> ROS parameters, one for the hostname/IP address of the laser range
> finder ("host") and one for the frame ID ("frame_id"). Configuration of
> the laser rangefinder is only possible through a separate (physical) 
> configuration port with a vendor-provided tool and cannot be changed at
> runtime.
> 
> Otherwise, rod4_node should behave like any other ROS laser rangefinder
> driver, i.e., publish a sensor_msgs::LaserScan on the "scan" topic
> whenever a new scan comes in.
> 
> I'll see if I can add proper documentation to the ROS wiki shortly (see
> my other message to the list).
> 
> Feedback/suggestions are welcome.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Rene
> 
> [1] http://www.leuze.de/products/los/mess/rod4/rod4_en.html
> [2] http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/agebv/en/ReneWagnerDiplomarbeit