Purpose / Use cases

We need a node that will fuse two or more pointclouds into a single pointcloud.

Design

The node uses a message_filters::Synchronizer with a synchronization policy of message_filters::sync_policies::ApproximateTime to synchronize messages coming from separate subscriptions.

Assumptions / Known limits

Pointcloud fusion is supported from up to 8 sources only. This limitation is due to the message_filters package. Additionally, for the ApproximateTime policy to work, there should be N+1 messages in the queue in case N messages are desired to be fused. This limitation comes from the fact that the synchronizer needs a reference point to be able to group messages of approximately similar times together. See the ros1 documentation for more information.

Inputs / Outputs / API

These nodes have the following basic structure:

Input:

• number of source topics
• output frame id
• point cloud capacity

Related issues

• #38 - Implement point cloud fusion