Velodyne device driver

ROS device driver node that captures Velodyne 3D LIDAR data and publishes it to the velodyne_msgs/VelodyneScan topic.

Examples

Read the Velodyne input socket as fast as possible. Publish each complete revolution to velodyne/rawscan.

$ rosrun velodyne_driver velodyne_node

Read previously captured Velodyne packets from dump.pcap file. Publish messages to velodyne/rawscan at approximately 10 Hz rate.

Dump files can be grabbed by libpcap, Velodyne's DSR software, ethereal, wireshark, tcpdump, or the velodyne_driver vdump command.

$ rosrun velodyne_driver velodyne_node _pcap:=dump.pcap

ROS names

Node name: velodyne_node

Publishes: velodyne_packets raw Velodyne data packets for one entire revolution of the device.

Parameters:

~pcap (string): PCAP dump input file name (default: use real device)
~input/read_once (bool): if true, read input file only once (default false).
~input/read_fast (bool): if true, read input file as fast as possible (default false).
~input/repeat_delay (double): number of seconds to delay before repeating input file (default: 0.0).

Vdump Command

The vdump command dumps raw data from the Velodyne LIDAR in PCAP format. It is a shell script wrapper with some obscure options for the powerful tcpdump command.

Other methods of acquiring PCAP data include using tcpdump directly, wireshark, Velodyne's DSR software, and programming with libpcap.

Usage

  rosrun velodyne_driver vdump <file_prefix> [ <interface> ]

        <file_prefix>   file name to dump (with 3-digit number suffix)
        <interface>     interface to read from (default: "eth1")

Examples

Dump Velodyne packets to a series of files named "pcap-000", "pcap-001", etc. Each file will be about 100MB, holding a little more than 30 seconds of Velodyne packets. Type ^C when finished.

$ rosrun velodyne_driver vdump pcap- eth0