Velodyne VLP-16 driver question!

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Boyi Hu

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Dec 11, 2015, 9:18:37 PM12/11/15

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Hey,

I am very new to the ROS and 3D LIDAR and today I got the Velodyne VLP-16 LIDAR from our group, somehow I can not let it working properly. Here is some detail description of my problem:

I am using ROS indigo. First we I did is to use the sample data in the flash drive and uses some ROS command (http://www.pcl-users.org/Convert-pcap-to-pcd-Velodyne-HDL32E-td4034165.html) to convert the data from .pcap to .pcd format in order to run some PCL functions. The sample data was from HDL32E LIDAR and I had no problem of this part since the velodyne_pointcloud folder has the 32e_points.launch file.

Next step, I saved a .pcap file from the VLP-16 LIDAR and wanted to repeat the same procedure. Somehow this time I could not make it working since there is no VLP16_points.launch file in the velodyne_pointcloud folder!!! Then I searched online and from Github I saw the newest folder of the Velodyne driver do include the VLP16_points.launch, so I wonder what procedure should I do to upgrade the Velodyne related files to the newest version?

Since I am really new to this area so all comments will be highly appreciated!

Jack O'Quin

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Dec 14, 2015, 10:50:22 AM12/14/15

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You need to include the github source in your catkin workspace and build it yourself.

We do plan a new Indigo release to include VLP-16 support, but it's not ready yet.

Ordinarily, adding new features to an old release is not considered appropriate. But, I believe supporting the new device model in the long-term ROS distro makes sense in this case. It helps that the VLP-16 implementation is separate from and does not affect the other models. So, I don't anticipate any breakage on existing systems.