VL53L0X is an optical range sensor from STMicroelectronics
This is the first part of experiment with optical range sensor from STMicroelectronics VL53L0X. I used popular ultrasonic sensor HC-SR04 to compare basic properties.
Laser 360 range sensor from vacuum cleaner Neato XV-11 is one of the
most popular and cheapest way to get lidar for robotics experiments.
Sensor has two connectors - first is an ordinary serial port, another is
power for motor. Despite on XV-11 Lidar’s price, it provides pretty good
measurement data with transmission rate up to 5Hz. Of course there are
drivers for ROS, which consume raw sensor data and convert it LaserScan
format.
LaserScan is an array of range sensor data withing some angle range.
Neato Lidar provides range data in 360 degrees. LaserScan information
can be used in robotics for SLAM - map building, obstacle avoidance,
etc…
Today's episode is about using Kinect with ROS on Raspberry Pi 2 or
3.
Kinect is one of the most popular source of PointClouds - array of
points with 3D coordinates information.
It has proprietary connector - actually it's USB+12V bus, and needs
adapter for PC connection
Despite that Kinect is bigger than ASUS Xtion, it has also tilt motor,
microphone array, accelerometer and better support from ROS community
PointClouds can be converted to LaserScan - array of range sensor data
withing some angle range. It looks like lidar data, but not in 360
degrees.
Today's tutorial is about to connect USB Camera to Raspberry Pi and use
it with ROS (Robot Operating System) - read data though ROS image_view
and even stream to web browser!