PointCloud vs. PointCloud2 for unstructured point clouds

Question

Hi, I have an application that publishes an unstructured point cloud, which in turn will be used to update a costmap. I remember reading that PointCloud is going to be retired in future a versions in favor of PointCloud2.

However, a cursory look at PointCloud2 seems as though it needs well-defined height & width fields. How can I represent an unstructured point cloud using PointCloud2?

Can I simply set height to 1 and width to N, and expect the library to treat it as a simple vector of (x,y,z) co-ordinates?

K

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Originally posted by kbabu on ROS Answers with karma: 131 on 2011-11-22

Post score: 3

Answer 1

Have a look at the PointCloud2 definition including comments. Your guess is right, you can set height to 1 and width to the number of points in your cloud.

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Originally posted by Ben_S with karma: 2510 on 2011-11-22

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 3