Blickfeld ROS2 package

This package provides a ROS2 node for publishing PointCloud2 messages from Blickfeld LiDAR devices.

It also works with RTI Connext.

A launch with yaml parameterization also works in principle. However, for this package, the use of ros2 launch is still experimental with ROS2 Eloquent and therefore may not work, or only partially.

Supported devices

The Blickfeld ROS2 driver supports all currently available Blickfeld LiDARs such as Cube 1 and Cube Range 1.

Dependencies

To install the Blickfeld ROS2 driver, please make sure the following dependencies are installed on your system.

Build

$ colcon build --symlink-install --cmake-clean-first

If compiling with RTI Connext yields a CMake warning, please recompile without cleaning the build space beforehand.

Running the Blickfeld ROS node

The typical way to start the Blickfeld driver is as following:

$ ros2 run blickfeld_driver blickfeld_node --ros-args -p host:=cube-0056 --remap __node:=bf_lidar

You can also start it with more parameters, e.g.:

$ ros2 run blickfeld_driver blickfeld_node --ros-args -p host:=cube-0056 -p publish_ambient_light:=true -p publish_intensities:=false

If you prefer a similar way to launch, like you would in ROS(1) (beware of the new “.xml”), you can start the driver like this:

$ ros2 launch -a blickfeld_driver live_scanner.launch.xml host:=cube-0056

Or if you prefer to put the parameters into a yaml:

$ ros2 launch blickfeld_driver live_scanner_yaml.launch.py

This then uses a parameter yaml in the config directory.

Parameters

All the following parameters are available in launch and run:

Argument Note Default
host (required) The host name or the IP of the device you want to publish the point clouds from, e.g., cube-0028.
node_name Name of this ROS node. bf_lidar
point_cloud_out Topic to publish the PointCloud2 message to. $(var node_name)/points_raw
remap Remap this node’s input/output topics to commonly used ones.
If false, canonical names in the form of $(var node_name)/foo_(in/out) are used, depending on whether a topic is an input or an output topic.
true
lidar_frame_id The ROS TF where the point cloud should be in. lidar
rviz Start rviz if this argument is true. false
use_lidar_timestamp Set to true if the timestamp in the ROS point cloud message should be generated from the device timestamp; otherwise the timestamp will be the ROS time when the frame was received on ROS. true
publish_intensities Set to true if the PointCloud2 message should contain intensities. true
publish_ambient_light Set to true if the PointCloud2 message should contain the ambient light level. false
publish_explicit_range Set to true if the PointCloud2 message should contain the range field. false
publish_no_return_points Set to true if the PointCloud2 message should contain points in a given range for pulses without a return. false
no_return_point_range Dummy range for points of pulses without a return. 1.0
publish_all_returns Set to true to publish all the returns for every point. Adds the field return_id (ID for each returned point) to the point cloud. false
publish_time_delta If true, the PointCloud2 message will contain the timestamp field per point to represent the time offset from the start of the frame. false
publish_point_id Add the scanline_id field, the scanline_point_index field (= the point’s number in the scan line), and the point_id (= frame-global point ID) to PointCloud2 message.
If the device is configured to return multiple return points (multiple reflections), all these three IDs will be identical; only the return_id will differ.
false

Debugging

Add ‘__log_level:=debug’ to see details:

$ ros2 run blickfeld_driver blickfeld_node --ros-args --remap __node:=bf_lidar -p host:=cube-0056 -p publish_ambient_light:=true -p publish_no_return_points:=true __log_level:=debug

ROS2 message content

To look at the ROS message sent by this ROS node, you can use

$ debugging_tools/ros2-topic-echoparsed.py

It shows all the fields present in the message.

License

This package is released under a BSD 3-Clause License (see also https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause)