Hello,

I am currently working on a project where I would like to take a ROS node , in particular the Laser Pipeline node, and integrate it into our current source code maintained by Visual Studios on Windows 7. Our goal is to create a 3D composite map from data read in from a laser to help our  MANUS Assistive Robotic Manipulator (ARM) navigate better. The solution we came up with is to mount a Hokuyo Laser onto our MANUS ARM. Over the past couple weeks I have began to familiarize my self with how the laser_pipeline node works on Ubuntu and have successfully read in data from the laser and turned it into a  3D composite map. Now that the beginning phase of this process is over a few questions have come up. Is it possible to run ROS nodes without roscore? I understand that roscore acts as a communicator between all of the nodes. How I see it now is that roscore acts as a bridge between the implementation of the nodes, i.e. the laser reads in data, roscore takes the data to the filter, the data is filtered, roscore takes the data to the assembler, and finally the data is assembled into a map. How could we successfully implement these actions outside a ROS environment if in fact this is what is happening?

Thank you for your time,

Tyler.