Official ROS driver for Ouster sensors

Requirements | Getting Started | Usage | License

This ROS package provide support for all Ouster sensors with FW v2.0 or later. Upon launch the driver will configure and connect to the selected sensor device, once connected the driver will handle incoming IMU and lidar packets, decode lidar frames and publish corresponding ROS messages on the topics of /ouster/imu and /ouster/points. In the case the sensor supports dual return and it was configured to use this capability, then another topic will published named /ouster/points2 which corresponds to the second point cloud.

Requirements

This driver only supports Melodic and Noetic ROS distros.

In addition to the base ROS installation, the following ROS packages are required:

sudo apt install -y                     \
    ros-$ROS_DISTRO-pcl-ros             \
    ros-$ROS_DISTRO-rviz                \
    ros-$ROS_DISTRO-tf2-geometry-msgs

where $ROS-DISTRO is either melodic or noetic.

Additional dependenices:

sudo apt install -y \
    build-essential \
    libeigen3-dev   \
    libjsoncpp-dev  \
    libspdlog-dev   \
    cmake

Getting Started

To build the driver using ROS you need to clone the project into the src folder of a catkin workspace as shown below:

mkdir -p catkin_ws/src && cd catkin_ws/src
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/ouster-lidar/ouster-ros.git

Next to compile the driver you need to source the ROS environemt into the active termainl:

source /opt/ros/<ros-distro>/setup.bash # replace ros-distro with 'melodic' or 'noetic'

Finally, invoke catkin_make command from within the catkin workspace as shown below:

cd catkin_ws
catkin_make --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

Specifying Release as the build type is important to have a reasonable performance of the driver.

Usage

The package supports three modes of interaction, you can connect to a live senosr, replay a recorded bag or record a new bag file using the corresponding launch files. The commands are listed below

Sensor Mode

roslaunch ouster_ros sensor.launch      \
    sensor_hostname:=<sensor host name> \
    metadata:=<json file name>              # metadata is optional

Replay Mode

roslaunch ouster_ros replay.launch      \
    metadata:=<json file name>          \
    bag_file:=<path to rosbag file>

Recording Mode

roslaunch ouster_ros record.launch      \
    sensor_hostname:=<sensor host name> \
    metadata:=<json file name>          \
    bag_file:=<optional bag file name>

For further detailed instructions refer to the main guide

License

License File