Hello folks,

I'm happy to announce a ROS driver for the Neato XV-11 Laser Scanner [1].
ROS has had a driver for the Neato itself for sometime now [2], but this was
only useful for going through the Neato's onboard computer. Well now you can
just yank that XV-11 laser scanner out, strap it to your iRobot Create and
feed it right on into the rest of ROS! The XV-11 scanner gives 360 pings at
1 degree increments at a rate of 5Hz and is useful from ~6cm to ~5m.

Chad and I have written up a number of tutorials to help people get started
using this low-cost scanner including how to remove the laser from the
vacuum and wire it to USB [3], how to get it up and running with our ROS
driver [4] and how to interpret the raw bytes if you want to parse the data
yourself on a microcontroller [5].

Let us know if you have any problems/questions/comments.

- Eric Perko, Chad Rockey
CWRU Mobile Robotics Lab
mobilerobots.case.edu

[1] http://www.ros.org/wiki/xv_11_laser_driver
[2] http://www.ros.org/wiki/neato_robot
[3]
http://www.ros.org/wiki/xv_11_laser_driver/Tutorials/Connecting%20the%20XV-11%20Laser%20to%20USB
[4]
http://www.ros.org/wiki/xv_11_laser_driver/Tutorials/Running%20the%20XV-11%20Node
[5]
http://www.ros.org/wiki/xv_11_laser_driver/Tutorials/The%20Underlying%20XV-11%20Protocol%20Explained