ROS 2 Lidar Sensor Component

The ROS 2 Lidar Sensor component encapsulates simulation of lidar including data acquisition and publishing. It uses abstraction to enable easily replaceable implementations, differing in how to acquire points. Lidars are useful for tasks such as obstacle detection, localization, and navigation.

Provider

ROS 2 Gem

Dependencies

ROS 2 Frame component

Properties

ROS 2 Lidar Sensor component properties

Property	Description	Values	Default
Sensor Configuration	See Sensor Configuration properties
Lidar Model	What kind of lidar it is. This can be a custom one or corresponding to a real device.	Enumeration	`Custom3DLidar`
Lidar Implementation	Which mechanism to use for ray-casting (or other methods of acquiring data). Implementations can be registered by external Gems.	Enumeration	`SceneQueries`
Ignore Collision Layers	Collision layers to ignore when acquiring data. This is useful to avoid obstruction by the sensor mesh itself.	List	empty
Enable Segmentation	Whether to enable the class and instance segmentation feature. See Class Segmentation Configuration Component	Boolean	false
Points At Max	Whether to return points for values above maximum range (with infinity value).	Boolean	false

Note that depending on the lidar implementation, some additional properties may be present. You can modify lidar parameters for custom lidars, but not for specific lidar models, which have more complex firing patterns which are only approximately reflected by these properties.

Property	Description	Values	Default
Name	Name of the lidar, which reflects the choice of model	String	`CustomLidar`
Layers	How many vertical layers the lidar has.	Integer	24
Points per layer	How many point for each layer the lidar returns.	Integer	924
Layers	How many vertical layers the lidar has.	Integer	24
Min Horizontal Angle	Minimal horizontal angle for lidar firing pattern (degrees).	Float	-180.0
Max Horizontal Angle	Maximum horizontal angle for lidar firing pattern (degrees).	Float	180.0
Min Vertical Angle	Minimal vertical angle for lidar firing pattern (degrees).	Float	-35.0
Max Vertical Angle	Maximum vertical angle for lidar firing pattern (degrees).	Float	35.0
Min range	Smallest distance at which lidar returns a point.	Float	0.0
Max range	Largest distance at which lidar returns a real point. Note that if Points At Max is set, data will include infinity value points for max range.	Float	100.0

Usage

Add ROS 2 Lidar Sensor to your robot to simulate lidar data. Select lidar implementation and the model you would like to simulate.

If you have an NVIDIA graphics card, consider an efficient GPU implementation provided by RGL Gem . It is orders of magnitude faster than the default implementation, based on Physics scene queries. RGL Gem also supports several popular lidar models.