[Rock-dev] [Rock-users] Fast Rock to PCL Pointcloud conversion

[Jakob Schwendner]

(Moved this to rock-dev)

> 2. Avoid the Rock Pointcloud altogether and write a wrapper that
>    allows me to use PCL Pointclouds as Rock data types for the
>    unfiltered (high volume) point clouds.
This is also something we discussed and would like to work towards. E.g. use native datatypes from the most relevant packages for the respective type. For pointclouds this would indeed be PCL.
The problem with PCL is that its templated, and there are a large number of types to handle the various permutations of fields (e.g. color, normals, xyz, etc). This does not go well with component based software frameworks. Both ROS and Rock therefore cannot directly use an equivalent type over a connection, but have to handle the optionals somehow. In Rock we mostly use an empty std::vector for this. This is actually something Javier is looking into with the redesign of envire. Do you guys have an opinion on pointclouds?

Cheers,

Jakob