ROS 2.0 Node for the LD19 LIDAR sensor

This repository contains my ROS 2.0 driver for the LD19 LIDAR sensor. It's quite a compact, low cost lidar sensor with an impressive range of 12 metres. I got the sensor to add to very small robot platforms I've built for experimentaion and learning.

The manufacturer provided a C++ library to parse the data packets from the laser (sadly their is little to no documentation on the packset strucure, I might try and reverse engineer it at some point). That part of the code can be found in lipkg.h and lipkg.cpp.

The node itself has the following parameters:

1. port := the serial port address
2. frame_id := the laser sensor frame identifier
3. topic_name := the ROS 2 topic name to publish the laser scans to

Install from DockerHub

1. Pull the image

docker pull richardw347/ld19_lidar

2. Start a new container

docker run --device=/dev/ld19_lidar -i richardw347/ld19_lidar

Install from Source

1. Clone the repository into your ROS 2.0 worspace:

git clone git@github.com:richardw347/ld19_lidar.git

2. Install dependencies:

cd ../ && rosdep install --from-paths src

3. Build your workspace

colcon build

4. Launch the driver

ros2 launch ld19_lidar lidar.launch.py