A laser scanning data acquisition and display system based on ROS

In this paper, a 3D environmental data acquisition and display system is designed based on laser scanning technology and ROS. We set up the data acquisition platform using a 2D laser range finder mounted on a pan-tilt, the acquired 3D point cloud data will be processed and visualized based on ROS. Pan-tilt control module is designed to drive pan-tilt with laser range finder to specified location. The laser scanning data acquisition, processing and visualization module is developed based on ROS to fulfill the functions like communicating with laser range finder, filtering point cloud data, transforming laser scanning data to point clouds in base coordinate system and visualizing it in RVIZ. Finally, the developed system was used in 3D environmental scanning experiments, and the results show the effectiveness of the system.