Are you asking how to construct a sensor_msgs::PointCloud2
message from scratch? If this is the case: you construct it like any other ros message by first looking up the structure and documentation of that message in the .msg file.
Depending on the ros implementation you are using, most probably roscpp
or rospy
, you then need to construct an initialize its members. In c++ something like the following and in python also not too different.
#include <sensor_msgs/PointCloud2.h>
...
sensor_msgs::PointCloud2 msg; // construct message
msg.header = laserMsg.header; // perhaps something different, but often this is what you want
msg.height = 1; // or whatever you need
msg.widht = 10000; // or whatever your width is
msg.fields = ... // this is more complicated but just is just more of the same
// and so on
Admittedly the sensor_msgs::PointCloud2
message is one of the more complicated messages you may use (at least for me that's true). You need to read the .msg file very carefully, which should be enough to build your own message. It could help to inspect existing PointCloud2
messages that you know to be correct and/or look into the implementation of convertPointCloudToPointCloud2 .
Please note the most important part to understand about the message: in the PointField[] fields
you define the format in which your points are stored in the uint8[] data
member.
I just realized myself, that PointCloud2
allows for a lot of flexibility, because of PointField[] fields
, so I'm not sure what needs to be done to not break interoperability with other code. I'd assume that many nodes expect you define at least "x", "y" and "z" fields.
Edit answering the comment
From what I read in the documentation
- point_step is the size of one point in bytes, which you need to manually calculate for your particular format as specified in msg.fields. (with pen & paper). For example if msg.fields[0] has datatype uint16 (2 bytes) and count 3, then your write down 23=6 bytes for that field. Plus the rest of msg.fields. A common use case would be for you to have 3 entries in msg.fields (for x, y and z) where each has datatype = FLOAT32, which is 4 bytes. So point_step would be 34=12.
- row_step is should be just width*point_step. Seems rather odd me, because that is redundant.
- data then contains your actual data as specified in fields. So in the simple use case from above it would just be x1, y1,z1, x2, y2, z3, x3, y3, z3, ....
- What "is_dense = true" means is: this dataset has _no_ invalid points (e.g., NaN, Inf). (Source is about PCL but it sure is equivalent)
Ok, so what is your actual issue / question here?
What do you mean by "using natively"? Do you just want your node to send out PointCloud2 directly without conversion nodes or do you really want to fill a PointCloud2 by hand without other code doing that for you? There is code that allows you to basically just fill a point vector and publish that.
By natively, I do mean fill out the PointCloud2 manually. I currently have a sensor passing in a range and direction, and would like to publish to a PointCloud2 in order to use the sensor as input for mapping or SLAM.
In that case, just use pcl_ros. You can conveniently put your points in a pcl PointCloud (not PointCloud2) and publish that as a PointCloud2.
that is a good idea