Only released in EOL distros:   indigo jade

Package Summary

• A ROS node for rplidar written in python, which you may need to change port name, if you wanna custom you setting.
• Maintainer status: maintained

• Maintainer: Zhihao Xu < zhihao@iscas.ac.cn>

• Download: https://github.com/DinnerHowe/rplidar_python.git

• Author: Zhihao Xu
• License: TODO

Overview

• Before starting this tutorial, make sure you installed two python libs construct and pyserial. The rplidar_python package provides an other solution for RPlidar sensor usage in ros.This packge also allow robot launches a 360 degree scanning map through gmapping module without twisting.

Hardware Requirements

• to use rplidar_python, you should get a robot that provides odometry, like Turtlebot. Also,you need a RPlidar sensor. Here we use RPLIDAR 360 laser scanner development kit.
• we use RPlidar to replace kinect sensor and we mount it in the position of kinect,thus kinect tf frame is useful for RPlidar sensor as well.

Launch Example

• to make a map by RPlidar, you should launch rplidar_gmapping_demo.launch like:

     roslaunch rplidar_python rplidar_gmapping_demo.launch

  Or you may wanna see laser frame only by typing following command:

     roslaunch rplidar_python rplidar_demo.launch

Node

• driver for RPlidar. Automatically starts sensor and convert data stream into sensor_msgs/LaserScan type. sensor publish topic every frame, one frame contain 360 laser data.

Published Topic

• /scan(sensor_msgs/LaserScan)

  • output Laser scans to create the map from

Parameters

• range_min (flaot default 0.15)
  • the min range that laser can scan
  range_max (float default 6.0)
  • the min range that laser can scan
  frame_id (string default 'laser')
  • rplidar frame
  angle_max(float default pi)
  • the max angle that laser can reach
  angle_min(float default -pi)
  • the min angle that laser can reach
  angle_increment(float default -0.017453292519943295)
  • angular distance between measurements
  scan_time (float)
  • time between scans
  ranges (float[])
  • range data

• RPlidar c++ tutorial please check at here