Data
Sharing data is fundamental to the robotics community. As I collect data for our self-driving Lincoln MKZ, I’ll put links to it here.
Lidar in Snow
This is a ROS bag file containing point clouds collected by a single Velodyne VLP-16 lidar unit on top of our MKZ. The bag was recorded while we drove through a brief but intense snow storm. We expect that we will have multiple opportunities in 2018 and 2019 to collect similar (but larger) data sets, but we hope that this raw data is useful to people interested in the behavior of lidar in snowy conditions.
A few items to note: The ROS package we used for our ROS driver is the
velodyne_puck package from Vijay Kumar’s
lab. You’ll
want to use that node to replay the bag file. The reference frame is
velodyne, and you’ll want to set use_sim_time to true on the ROS
parameter server before running any nodes (including the rviz
visualizer, if that’s something you use). Failing to use simulation
time has led to incoherent visualizations, so when you play the bag
file I recommend that you use the command:
rosbag play --clock snow.bag