Livox ROS Driver 2

Livox ROS Driver 2 is the 2nd-generation driver package used to connect LiDAR products produced by Livox, applicable for ROS (Noetic recommended) and ROS2 (Foxy or Humble recommended).

Note: This is a fork of the original repository with changes made for compatibility with the MRS UAV System.

Disclaimer:

As a debugging tool, Livox ROS Driver is not recommended for mass production but limited to test scenarios. You should optimize the code based on the original source to meet your various needs.

Prerequisities

• Ubuntu 18.04 for ROS Melodic (tested)
• Ubuntu 20.04 for ROS Noetic and ROS2 Foxy (untested)
• Ubuntu 22.04 for ROS2 Humble (untested)

Install

Replace workspace and ROS_VERSION with the path to your ROS workspace and your ROS version:

WORKSPACE=$HOME/workspace
ROS_VERSION=ROS1 # (ROS1, ROS2)

cd ~/git && git clone [email protected]:ctu-mrs/livox_ros_driver2.git
cd $WORKSPACE/src && ln -sf ~/git/livox_ros_driver2 .
cd $WORKSPACE/src/livox_ros_driver2/installation && ./install.sh $ROS_VERSION 

Set up your Livox sensor

Update the livox_ros_driver2/config/MID360_config.json with the IP address of your Livox sensor. The IP is 192.168.1.1XX where XX are the last two digits of the sensor's SN.

Build

cd $WORKSPACE
catkin build livox_ros_driver2

Note: do not forget to source your WORKSPACE in your .*rc file.

Launching

roslaunch livox_ros_driver2 mid360.launch xfer_format:=X

where X is 1 for Point-LIO compatibility and 0 for RViz visualization.

Parametrizations

All internal parameters of livox_ros_driver2 are in the launch files. Below are detailed descriptions of the three commonly used parameters:

Parameter	Detailed description	Default
publish_freq	Set the frequency of the point cloud publishing. Floating-point data type, recommended values: 5.0, 10.0, 20.0, 50.0, .... (100.0 Hz is the maximum).	10.0
multi_topic	If the LiDAR device has an independent topic to publish pointcloud data 0 -- All LiDAR devices use the same topic to publish pointcloud data 1 -- Each LiDAR device has its own topic to publish point cloud data	0
xfer_format	Set pointcloud format 0 -- sensor_msgs::PointCloud2 (Livox custom PointXYZRTLT format) 1 -- Livox custom format (Point-LIO compatiblerr) 2 -- sensor_msgs::PointCloud2 (pcl::PointXYZI)	0

Note : Other parameters not mentioned in this table are not suggested to be changed unless fully understood.

Point cloud types:

[0] Livox custom PointXYZRTLT format

float32 x               # X axis (m)
float32 y               # Y axis (m)
float32 z               # Z axis (m)
float32 intensity       # the value is reflectivity, 0.0~255.0
uint8   tag             # Livox tag
uint8   line            # laser number in lidar
float64 timestamp       # timestamp of point

Note : The number of points in the frame may be different but each point provides a timestamp.

[1] Livox custom format (Point-LIO compatible)

std_msgs/Header header     # ROS standard message header
uint64          timebase   # The time of first point
uint32          point_num  # Total number of pointclouds
uint8           lidar_id   # Lidar device id number
uint8[3]        rsvd       # Reserved use
CustomPoint[]   points     # Pointcloud data

with each point being specified as

uint32  offset_time     # offset time relative to the base time
float32 x               # X axis (m)
float32 y               # Y axis (m)
float32 z               # Z axis (m)
uint8   reflectivity    # reflectivity, 0~255
uint8   tag             # Livox tag
uint8   line            # laser number in lidar

[2] sensor_msgs::PointCloud2 (pcl::PointXYZI)

Sensor configurations

For .json configurations and mulit-sensor connections, please refer to the original Livox-SDK repository.

TODO

• Nodeletize the I/O
• Improve param loading through mrs_lib::ParamLoader
• Make the Point-LIO specific format visualizable in Rviz