This tutorial guides you through the basics of working with the data produced by a planar laser scanner (such as a Hokuyo URG or SICK laser). To learn how to actually produce or change data from laser scanners, please see the laser_drivers stack.

Raw laser scans contain all points returned from the scanner without processing. Many applications, however, are better served by filtered scans which remove unnecessary points (such as unreliable laser hits or hits on the robot itself), or pre-process the scans in some way (such as by median filtering). This tutorial will teach you how to apply pre-existing filters to laser scans.

In this tutorial you will learn how to assemble individual laser scan lines into a composite point cloud. One particular use case is to assemble individual scan lines from a laser on a tilting stage into a single point cloud to form a full 3D laser sweep.

Raw laser scans contain all points returned from the scanner without processing. Many applications, however, are better served by filtered scans which remove unnecessary points (such as unreliable laser hits or hits on the robot itself), or pre-process the scans in some way (such as by median filtering). This tutorial will teach you how to apply pre-existing filters to laser scans.

This code snippet shows how to modify and create a sensor_msgs/Image.

This tutorial shows how to publish images using all available transports.

This tutorial shows how to subscribe to images using any available transport. By using the image_transport subscriber to subscribe to images, any image transport can be used at run-time. To learn how to actually use a specific image transport, see the next tutorial.

This tutorial discusses running the simple image publisher and subscriber using multiple transports.

This tutorial covers how to discover which transport plugins are included in your system and make them available for use. No programming required!

This tutorials covers how to write publisher and subscriber plugins for a new image transport option.