Stephane,

Wouldn't you want the driver to produce PointCloud(2) messages directly? Is there an advantage to produce LaserScan data 
too? If so, you can produce both.

Cheers,
Radu.


On 10/28/2010 12:12 AM, Stéphane Magnenat wrote:
> Dear list,
>
> At ASL we are beginning to write a ROS driver for the Velodyne HDL-64E
> S2. There exists already a Velodyne driver in ROS but for a different model.
>
> The Velodyne HDL-64E S2 is a rotating lidar sensor that consists of 64
> lasers mounted on a rotating platform. The sensor head rotates up to 15
> rps and at that speed it acquires ~1400 points per laser per turn.
>
> We can thus consider this scanner as being a source of LaserScan (64
> points) and tf_data (the rotation matrix of the head) at the rate of 21
> kHz. Ideally, one would use a scan_to_cloud_filter_chain to fuse these
> into a point cloud. However with a sensor of such a high bandwidth the
> amount of context switches seems prohibitively large for implementing
> such a scheme. While maybe with current hardware this sensor produces
> too much data for complex real-time processing, the conceptual problem
> remains.
>
> Is there any discussion on this question or any work toward a solution,
> for instance implementing laser_filters using nodelets?
>
> Thank you, kind regards,
>
> Stéphane
>