The recent ICRA (International Conference on Robotics and Automation) research conference hosted another successful PCL tutorial on Friday, May 10. Given the fact that some of the PCL luminaries were present at the event, this was the perfect opportunity to use the day prior to the event and hold a meeting for a generic "PCL roadmap" discussion.
Taken almost as a scene from a Cosa Nostra movie, the group talked about PCL 1.7, interoperability issues regarding the PointCloud2 format, but also the way to push forward agendas using pcl-developers@ as a forum for discussions. Decisions such as "to break" or not a part of the API have always been open for vote in PCL, and as the code base and the community continue to grow, these decisions and discussions around them are going to be increasingly more important.
Such meetings have been proven to be very beneficial in the past as well for PCL, with all sorts of different collaborations being spawn between participants, some leading to joint research publications, while others resulting in better code contributions. Given that there's a plethora of scientific events being organized each year, we thought about encouraging any developers to propose such single day PCL tutorial sessions, in order to get a chance to meet your fellow colleague developers, but more importantly your users.…
PCL's actual grabber interface provides a smooth and convenient access to different devices and their drivers, file formats and other sources of data. The first driver that was incorporated is the OpenNI Grabber, which makes it a breeze to request data streams from OpenNI compatible cameras. The cameras that have been tested so far are the Primesense Reference Design, Microsoft Kinect for XBox and Asus Xtion Pro.
Microsofts Kinect for Windows was not compatible with PCL yet, because it is driven by the Kinect SDK which is not compatible with OpenNI.
Now there is an Open Source package available containing a dll module which functions as bridge between the Kinect SDK, OpenNI and PCL.
This bridge module was developped by Tomoto S. Washio and made compatible to PCL by Michael Dingerkus. For compatibility there is a patch included to install extensions for PCL in terms of handling…
Following the January 7 news item on publicly available point cloud data sets many in the PCL community have responded positively, and contributed a number of links to publicly available data and software repositories. Based on the comments and requests of these members it is clear that there is a need for a common place for researchers to advertise publicly available data and software related to the processing of point clouds. As a step in this direction the set of collected links has been organized and placed on the PCL media page. The community is encouraged to contribute new links as well as to comment on best way to organize these links as to provide easy access to high-quality data for the development and comparison of new algorithms related to point cloud processing.
The above image shows an example data set from the Robotic 3D Scan Repository and has been reproduced with permission from Professor Andreas Nüchter, Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH, Germany.
Pat Marion, an R&D Engineer at Kitware, has concluded his work on the joint Open Perception - Ocular Robotics code sprint. The goal of the code sprint was to develop a pcl::Grabber driver interface for the RE0x laser sensors and to develop visualization code capable of real-time display of point cloud data streams acquired by the grabber interface.
The pcl::RobotEyeGrabber is a new C++ class that was added to the pcl io module. It implements the pcl::Grabber interface and provides access to point cloud data streams sent over the network by RE0x laser sensors. A point cloud visualization application called RobotEye Viewer was developed using the RobotEyeGrabber and PCLVisualizer. The application uses the RobotEye C++ API to send control messages to the RobotEye laser sensor and displays real-time point cloud streams acquired using the grabber interface.
The following video demonstrates the RobotEye Viewer application in action using a RE05 laser sensor:
Federico Tombari and Alex Ichim will be representing PCL at the Smart Libraries for Computer Graphics event organized by the Eurographics Italian Chapter. They will be giving a talk on the PCL modules, with a focus on registration.
Toyota has been a long term supporter of PCL, and pretty much created the concept of code sprints for PCL, with the first PCL code sprint ever: TOCS! This year, we have partnered with our colleagues from Toyota again for a series of 3 new exciting code sprint projects:
Primitive shape (cylinders, spheres, cones, etc.) recognition in point cloud data
Segmentation/Clustering of objects in cluttered environments
3D feature development and benchmarking
PCL-TOCS(#2) will run for 3 months during the spring of 2013. As always, interested candidates should submit the following information to jobs@pointclouds.org:
a brief resume
a list of existing PCL contributions (if any)
a list of projects (emphasis on open source projects please) that they contributed to in the past
This project requires good C++ programming skills, and knowledge of PCL internals.
It is our pleasure to announce a new code sprint from our host organization, Open Perception, and Spectrolab, a Boeing company. Spectrolab has expressed interest in connection with the potential possibilities that PCL offers, and we will be searching for outstanding candidates to participate in a new code sprint that involves the development of 3D Viewer Software in PCL, as well as an advanced sensor grabber for Spectrolab's SpectroScan3D LIDAR imager.
The sprint will run for 3 months in the sprint of 2013. Potential candidates should submit the following information to jobs@pointclouds.org:
a brief resume
a list of existing PCL contributions (if any)
a list of projects (emphasis on open source projects please) that they contributed to in the past
This project requires good C++ programming skills, knowledge of PCL internals and a basic understanding of laser sensors and 3D visualization.
It includes pure MATLAB code to read and write unorganized point clouds as PCD files and a wrapper function for point cloud visualization that writes the MATLAB data to a temporary file and sets pcl_viewer loose on it. Using files is inelegant and inefficient, but we sidestep the whole problem of trying to create MEX files linked to PCL.
This is a work in progress and things to add are writing binary PCD; reading/writing binary_compressed formatted files; handling organized data.
The PCL community has contributed a number of links to publicly available repositories for data and software. The links are being organized on the PCL Media page.
The joint Open Perception-Ocular Robotics code sprint has concluded. The code sprint was a success. New code developed for the code sprint includes a pcl::Grabber for the Ocular Robotics RobotEye RE0x sensor and the RobotEye Viewer, a live point cloud visualization app using Qt and the RobotEye grabber.
The Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are sponsoring a new PCL code sprint on the topic of human detection and tracking out of 3D data.
