PCL Developers blog
All blog posts
Here’s a video demonstrating the RobotEye Viewer application with the Ocular Robotics RE05 lidar sensor. See my previous blog post for a description of the application.
I’ve finished developing a new pcl::Grabber called the pcl::RobotEyeGrabber, and a visualization application called RobotEye Viewer. The grabber uses the boost asio library to do asynchronous I/O on a UDP socket using a separate thread. The RobotEye sensor sends lidar data in UDP data packets which are converted by the grabber into pcl::PointCloud data. The RobotEye Viewer is a Qt application that uses the QVTKWidget to embed a pcl::visualization::PCLVisualizer visualization window.
I developed the code using MacOSX and Ubuntu Linux. I ssh to a machine that is located at the Ocular Robotics lab and has a live sensor connected to it. With this machine, I was able to run the RobotEye Viewer application remotely using the RE05 lidar sensor. Ocular Robotics setup a webcam that points at the RobotEye sensor so I can see it in action as I run the application remotely. This setup worked out very well. Here’s a screenshot of the application, stay tuned for a video.
Ocular Robotics sent me some lidar scans to get started with. The data is stored in binary files with azimuth, elevation, range, and intensity fields. I wrote some code to load the binary data and convert it to the pcl::PointCloud data structure. From there, I saved the data in the pcd file format and opened it with ParaView using the PCL Plugin for ParaView. I used ParaView’s animation controls to create a video of the lidar scan:
I’m excited to start the PCL - Ocular Robotics code sprint. This week I’ll have a kickoff meeting over Skype with engineers from Ocular Robotics. In the meantime, I’m reading about the RE0x sensors and updating my PCL build directories!