ABSTRACT
The Point Cloud Library (PCL) offers an array of functions for interpreting 3-D data. The present treatment is not intended to be a comprehensive tutorial of PCL. A PCL processing node offers an action server that accepts an object code and attempts to find the coordinates of that object in the scene. With the data reduction, algorithms applied to point-cloud interpretation can run significantly faster. In addition to demonstrating down sampling, the findplanepcdfile illustrates a means of interacting with the point-cloud data to assist interpretation of the data. Within the display ellipse node, a point-cloud object is populated with computed values that describe an ellipse extruded in the z direction that has coloration that varies in the z direction. As expected, the image consists of sample points of an extruded ellipse with color variation in the extrusion (z) direction. This image can be rotated, translated and zoomed in rviz, which helps one to perceive its 3-D spatial properties.
