Sick_Safetyscanners ROS Driver

A ROS Driver which reads the raw data from the SICK Safety Scanners and publishes the data as a laser_scan msg.

The ROS2 Driver can be found here: https://github.com/SICKAG/sick_safetyscanners2

Table of contents

• Supported Hardware
• Getting started
• ROS API
• Creators

Supported Hardware

Supported are all microScan3, nanoScan3 and outdoorScan3 variants with Ethernet connection.

Getting started

The ROS driver will be released as a debian package, and therefore can be installed from binaries or from source.

Prerequisites

• Linux
• Working ROS-Distro
• Correctly setup SICK Safety Scanner
• Connected SICK Safety Scanner and a correctly setup ethernet network. Both the host and the sensor have to be in the same network.

Installation

In the following instructions, replace <rosdistro> with the name of your ROS distro (e.g., kinetic).

From Binaries

The driver is released at longer intervals as a binary package.

sudo apt-get install ros-<rosdistro>-sick-safetyscanners

From Source

source /opt/ros/<rosdistro>/setup.bash
mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src/
cd ~/catkin_ws/src/
git clone https://github.com/SICKAG/sick_safetyscanners.git
cd ..
catkin_make install
source ~/catkin_ws/install/setup.bash

Starting

To start the driver the launch file has to be started. For the driver to work correctly, the sensor ip and host ip have to be defined. These parameters can be passed to the sensor as arguments via launch file.

roslaunch sick_safetyscanners sick_safetyscanners.launch sensor_ip:=192.168.1.10 host_ip:=192.168.1.9

This will start the driver and the dynamic reconfigure node. In this you can set different parameters on runtime, especially the angles and the data the sensor should publish. If these parameters should be set on startup they can be loaded to the parameter server beforehand.

To visualize the data start rviz and subscribe to the ~/laser_scan topic.

rosrun rviz rviz 

Troubleshooting

• Check if the sensor has power and is connected to the host.
• Check if both sensor and host are in the same subnet e.g. 192.168.1
• Check if the launch file is called with the correct parameters for IP-addresses and ports.

ROS API

Advertised ROS Topics

` ~/laser_scan (type: sensor_msgs/LaserScan) `

Publishes a scan from the laserscanner

` ~/extended_laser_scan (type: sick_safetyscanners/ExtendedLaserScanMsg) `

Extends the basic laser scan message by reflector data and intrusion data.

` ~/output_paths (type: sick_safetyscanners/OutputPathMsg) `

File truncated at 100 lines see the full file