LiDAR Visualizer

Owned by Andrew Shum
Last updated: 2024-08-18
2 min read

The LiDAR visualizer is a tool designed to display data from a LiDAR sensor in a 2-dimensional space. This visualizer provides a top-down view of the environment where each point represents a LiDAR reading. This allows users to analyze what the LiDAR sees.

Setup:

  1. Ensure you are in the lidar_viewer directory.

  2. Run ./process_log.sh <path_to_log_file> [--start]

    1. Where path_to_log_file is the path to the log file generated by obstacle avoidance or the lidar driver only.

    2. Add the --start flag to start the server.

  3. If you did not use --start, start the server by entering the server directory, cd server, and then run node server.js.

  4. Then, in a new terminal, start the visualizer by entering the visualizer directory, cd visualizer and running npm start.

    1. Ensure you have installed all packages by running npm install beforehand.

  5. Open localhost:3000 on your machine to see lidar points.

LiDAR Visualizer Interface

Usage:

If you are using a lidar driver output file, you will only see the LiDAR points.

If using an obstacle avoidance logging file, you will see both LiDAR points and odometry from the drone.

Scale

This adjusts the zoom of the visualizer to the drone. The greater the value, the more zoomed in the visualizer will be. This is useful for seeing points closer to the drone.

Update Rate

This adjusts how fast data points are updated to the screen. The value in the input box represents the number of milliseconds until a new point is a drawn to the screen. So, the greater the value, the slower the points are updated.

Number of Visible Points

This adjusts the number of visible points on the screen at one instance.

 

TODO:

  • Open source licensing (WARG Redistribution Policy)

  • Automated js testing in github

  • Javascript style guide

  • Separate App.js into components

  • CSS

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