CCNY ROS pkg release

announcement from the CCNY Robotics lab on ros-users

Dear ROS community,

The Robotics Lab at the City College of New York is releasing a collection of ROS tools that we are developing for our research. The packages, which are BoxTurtle-compatible, are grouped in the ccny-ros-pkg stack. Documentation is available on the ROS wiki.

We have made an effort to include a screenshot and youtube video demonstrating the usage of each single package on the corresponding wiki page. The packages also come with a pre-recorded bag and demo launch files, allowing developers to quickly test and get started with using the tools.

The current collection of packages includes:

• gpsd_viewer: a map viewer for GPS position data provided by gpsd_client.
• artoolkit - a meta-package which downloads and installs ARToolkit locally.
• ar_pose - an ROS wrapper for ARToolkit, capable of tracking the position of single or multiple AR markers relative to the camera, broadcasting the corresponding transforms, as well as publishing visualization markers to rviz.
• laser_scan_splitter - a tool which takes a LaserScan message as input and splits it into an arbitrary number of segments.
• laser_ortho_projector - a tool which takes a LaserScan, as well as a position of the laser in a fixed frame, and outputs the orthogonal projection of the scan, invariant to the roll-, pitch- and z- position of the laser.
• point_cloud_filter - a threshold filter for PointCloud messages, which filters points based on values from any of the cloud's additional channels, such as "confidence" or "intensity"

Additional tools scheduled for release this summer include a driver for the AscTec Autopilot for use with AscTec quadrotor UAVs. We are looking forward to hearing back from you with comments and suggestions on how to improve our software.

William Morris,
Ivan Dryanovski,
Gautier Dumonteil