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