ROS 2 PCD Publisher

This ROS 2 package (pcd_publisher) provides a node that reads a PCD (Point Cloud Data) file and publishes its contents as a PointCloud2 message on a ROS 2 topic.

Prerequisites

• ROS 2 (tested on Humble, but should work on other distributions)
• PCL (Point Cloud Library) 1.12 or later
• C++14 or later

Installation

1. Create a new directory in your ROS 2 workspace's src folder:

   mkdir -p ~/ros2_ws/src
   cd ~/ros2_ws/src
   git clone https://github.com/omerssid/pcd_publisher.git

2. Build the package:

   cd ~/ros2_ws
   colcon build --symlink-install --packages-select pcd_publisher

3. Source the setup file:

   source ~/ros2_ws/install/setup.bash

Usage

ROS 2 PointCloud2 publisher (reads a PCD file)

Run the publisher node:

ros2 run pcd_publisher pcd_publisher --ros-args -p pcd_file_path:=/path/to/pcd

The node will publish the point cloud data on the /pointcloud topic.

ROS 2 PointCloud2 subscriber (writes a PCD file)

Run the subscriber:

ros2 run pcd_publisher pcd_subscriber --ros-args -p pcd_file_path:=/path/to/pcd -p topic:=/pointcloud

The subscriber will listen to the /pointcloud topic and save the received point cloud data to a PCD file.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Remarks

In VS code it is advised to add the following to include path:

${workspaceFolder}/**
/opt/ros/humble/include/**
/usr/include/pcl-1.12/**
/usr/include/eigen3/**

If you are not sure where your header files are use e.g.:

find /usr/include -name point_cloud.h
find /usr/include -name crop_box.h