[ros-users] PCL nodelet PointCloudConcatenateFieldsSynchronizer

[Felix Ruess]

Hi,

I'm using the pcl::concatenateFields(cloud_a, cloud_b, cloud_out)
function to concatenate
  pcl::PointCloud<pcl::PointXYZ> cloud_a;
  pcl::PointCloud<pcl::Normal> cloud_b;
to
  pcl::PointCloud<pcl::PointNormal> cloud_out;
and it works great!

Is there any possibility to specify the output cloud type for the
nodelet pcl/PointCloudConcatenateFieldsSynchronizer somehow as well?
(This is used in the normal estimation launch file for example).

The problem I have with the nodelet is that I'm trying to convert the
output pointcloud2 message to
    struct PointNormal;
    // Members: float x, y, z; uint32_t w; float normal[3], curvature;
to read the data.
Now of course this does not work as the padding w is missing from the
output pointcloud2 message I get from the nodelet since it "only"
concatenates the existing fields of the input clouds.

So, is there some way to adapt the nodelet to output a pointcloud2
message that corresponds to a specific pcl PointCloud<specified point
type>?

Cheers,
Felix Ruess

P.S. I did not sent this to pcl-users because the nodelet lives in pcl_ros