ROS 2 wrapper for velodyne drivers

Hi, Is anyone aware of any active development of a ROS2 compatible version of the velodyne drivers. Presently, I could only find the ROS1 version here.
I couldn’t find a velodyne library either, does that mean if I want to use it in native ROS2 (without the ros1 bridge), I’ll have to build it completely in ROS2 from scratch?

@batman we have written a VLP16 driver for ROS2 which is easily extendable to other ring-shaped lidars.
The driver is loosely based on https://github.com/ros-drivers/velodyne but also greatly improved in terms of:

  1. Static memory
  2. To work on data as soon as it’s available
  3. To have minimal latency by using e.g. ring buffers

Currently we are not ready to release it yet but plan to do it later this year.

If you need it earlier send me a PM.

D.

@Dejan_Pangercic Would you mind ask when do you release the driver?

@elitechrome it is planned for this month, see: https://gitlab.com/AutowareAuto/AutowareAuto/issues/4.

LMK if you interested to test it.

@tfoote / @dirk-thomas - I am one of the current maintainers for https://github.com/ros-drivers/velodyne. Is there any way that one of you (or any of the other ros2 Github maintainers) could create a velodyne fork under https://github.com/ros2/velodyne so I (and others) can begin working on the port in an official repo?

@JWhitleyWork If you’re maintaining both versions unless you’re planning a ground up rewrite I’d recommend developing keeping it in the same repository and just use a different development branch. This will allow you to keep the code bases close and facilitate code reuse.

Like ROS1 the ROS2 ecosystem is intended to be a large federated ecosystem, we put a lot of things into the ros2 organization during early development but not everything needs or should be there, and some things will be expected to merge back to their original repositories as we get time to cleanup and merge back changes instead of planning to maintain parallel forked projects.

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Thanks, @tfoote. I’ll work on it as a separate branch for now.

@Dejan_Pangercic - Any news on a release date from your end? I saw that it had been pushed back to another milestone but I would be happy to test it pre-release as well.

@Dejan_Pangercic we’re also interested in helping develop and/or testing your Velodyne driver. Thanks!

@JWhitleyWork @rgreid sorry for late reply. The development for ROS2 based velodyne driver has been done and merged. I commented on it here: https://github.com/ros-drivers/velodyne/issues/165#issuecomment-457389562.

Thanks, @Dejan_Pangercic! I’ll reply in the Github issue.