[ros-users] scan_to_cloud_filter_chain for high-bandwidth scanners

[Stéphane Magnenat]

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

-- 
Dr Stéphane Magnenat
http://stephane.magnenat.net