[Orca-robotics-devel] Laser2Og - ignoring non returns

[Namal S. <nam...@gm...>]

Hi all,

I have been working with the robot2d + laser2d + ognode +
laser2ogcombination for sometime and I noticed that when the laser
return is equal
to
the maximum range, an occupancy value is not generated. So when a robot
moves to an area where obstacles are outside the range of the laser
sensor, the cell values remain unchanged instead of being changed to
"unoccupied".

I looked through the code of laser2og and found that in laser2og.cpp,
Laser2Og::process function, any scan return which is greater than or equal
to the
maxLaserRange_  is ignored as follows

 // for each return


    for ( int i=0; i<(int)scan.ranges.size(); i++ )
    {
        // Ignore non-returns


        if ( scan.ranges[i] >= maxLaserRange_-1e-3 ) continue;

The if condition effectively ignores any return which signals free space,
thus resulting in an Ogmap with less information

I don't know whether there was another reason for this condition to be in
the code, but commenting the if condition solved this problem for me.

thanks

BR,
Namal