IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering

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Robot Operating System (ROS) Compatible Low Cost Rotating Light

Detection and Ranging (Lidar) Design
To cite this article: N S Widodo et al 2018 IOP Conf. Ser.: Mater. Sci. Eng. 384 012058

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International Symposium on Materials and Electrical Engineering (ISMEE) 2017 IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 384 (2018) 012058 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/384/1/012058
1234567890‘’“”

Robot Operating System (ROS) Compatible Low Cost

Rotating Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) Design

N S Widodo1, S A Akbar1 and A Rahman2

1
Program Studi Teknik Elektro, Universitas Ahmad Dahlan, Jl Prof Dr Soepomo SH,
Yogyakarta
2
Program Studi Sistem Informasi, Universitas Ahmad Dahlan, Jl Prof Dr Soepomo
SH, Yogyakarta

*[email protected]

Abstract. Robot Operating system (ROS) is collection of software frameworks for robot
software development. Researchers that work with ROS will have an opportunity to use or to
be exact to reuse any software framework from another researcher as long as they use a similar
robot platform, or similar device that has been include in the ROS. This paper present a design
for a low cost rotating Lidar that compatible with ROS. As all we know distance measurement
is the basic for building an autonomous capability for robots. Rotating lidar is among one the
most popular device used to acquire this kind of information. However most of them are not
suitable for low budget project because of their high cost. The design presented here tries to
build a low cost rotating lidar based on Lidar Lite device with the compatibility with the ROS.
The design incorporate a control board based on a microcontroller.

1. Introduction
LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is an optical remote sensing technology that measure the
diffused property of the light to calculate the distance or another quantity from a remote targeted
object. In general it can be said that lidar is a method to measure the distance to an object or surface
using laser pulse. Just like a radar, that uses a radio wave rather than light, a lidar measure the distance
to an object by measuring the time elapsed between light pulse transmission and the reflected pulse
detection. LIDAR technologies has been widely applied in the field of geodetic, archeology,
geographic, and atmospheric surveys. Another area that benefited by the lidar technology is the area of
robotic, with its main function as distance measurement sensor, the lidar has become increasingly
popular in robotic, especially in the area of mobile robotic, as presented in [1]. As we all know
distance information is the basic information to build autonomous robot behavior, ranging from
obstacle avoidance behavior to simultaneous location and mapping, based on distance measurement
information. Many researchers use vision sensor to build their robot localization ability, such as [2]-
[6]. Others use ranging sensor, such as lidar to build the capability. The most popular lidar used in
robotics is the scanning lidar or often mentioned as scanning laser, in which the unit is rotating
continuously and performs series of distance measurement simultaneously. However the current
scanning laser available on the market are relatively high cost for a small budget robotic. Fortunately,
there has been a cheap lidar with the price below $200, but it lack the scanning capability compared to

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International Symposium on Materials and Electrical Engineering (ISMEE) 2017 IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 384 (2018) 012058 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/384/1/012058
1234567890‘’“”

the higher priced lidar. This paper presented a design to build a scanning lidar based on the
aforementioned cheap lidar with the compatibility to Robot Operating System (ROS).
Robot operating system or ROS, is actually not an operating system, but it rather serves as a
middleware between a computer and robot related hardware or subsystem. ROS enables a robot
researcher to use and reuse a package, a collection of program, including a driver for a specific robot
hardware, in another robot. It provide a package for many robot platforms, sensors, or actuators
commonly used both in industrial robot or research robot. Anyone also possible to build his own robot
platform in ROS based on the available sensor, actuator and control algorithm packages in ROS. ROS
has been used in many kind of robots, as can be found in [7]-[10]. The design presented on this paper
based on a lidar sensor and rotating mechanism controlled by a microcontroller to build a rotating lidar
compatible with ROS with a target cost below $400.

2. Research Methodology
The design comprised hardware configuration and software configuration. It is important to note that
the design has a targeted budget not more than $400, since it’s the lowest scanning lidar available in
the market right now.

2.1. Hardware Configuration

The main hardware component is obviously a lidar, a Lidar Lite V3 from Garmin, as shown in figure
1, was used in this design. It has a maximum range of 40 meters, 1 cm resolution, 2.5 cm accuracy for
range below 5 m and 10 cm in range more than 5m. The unit has an update rate of 270 Hz in typical,
and 650 Hz in fast mode, it means that the unit is able to provide 270 measurement in 1 second in
typical an 650 measurements in in 1 second in fast mode. The price tag for the unit is around $150.

Figure 1. Lidar Lite V3.

As for the rotating actuator, a stepper motor is used, stepper motor was chosen because its
simplicity to obtain a consistent step of rotation, as long as it’s not loaded with heavier load that its
torque. The Arduino Nano is used for controlling the lidar operation and stepper rotation. It also works
as message generator for the ROS through a serial connection with the computer running ROS. To
eliminate a mechanical design complexity, in this case, mechanical design needed to avoid cable
tangling especially the cable for the LIDAR due to its scanning/rotating movement, a Bluetooth based
connection is used between the Arduino and the Computer. The overall block diagram presented in
figure 2.

Figure 2. Block Diagram.

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International Symposium on Materials and Electrical Engineering (ISMEE) 2017 IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 384 (2018) 012058 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/384/1/012058
1234567890‘’“”

2.2. Software Configuration

The software section of the design serves mainly to control the operation of the lidar and the stepper
motor, and to form a message containing the information from the lidar that compatible with the ROS
laser scan message type. The flowchart of the software section is shown in figure 3.

Figure 3. Flowchart.

The Lidar Lite V3 has two interfaces, I2C and PWM. The design presented here uses the I2C
interface, and based on the sample code provided in from Garmin as the manufacturer of the unit,
https://github.com/garmin/LIDARLite_v3_Arduino_Library [11]. After the measurement the distance
information is packed together with the position of the stepper, in the form of angle, that range
between 0° to 360°, as a representation of a full rotation.
For laser scanners, ROS provides a special Message type in the sensor_msgs package called
LaserScan to hold information about a given scan. LaserScan Messages make it easy for code to work
with virtually any laser as long as the data coming back from the scanner can be formatted to fit into
the message. Base on this, the next stage conducted in the Arduino Nano is to ensure that the message
its generate is has the same format with the LaserScan message in ROS so it can be processed further
in ROS.
On the ROS side we need at least two functions, the first is a driver that enable the ROS to
recognize and find the designed rotating lidar module and to receive a message from it, and the second
is a publisher that enable another part of the ROS listen to the message and process it accordingly.

3. Result and Discussion

The rotating lidar built in this paper has been tested with ROS, especially ROS Indigo, in an Ubuntu
14.4 LTS Laptop. For verification purpose the result of the scan from the rotating lidar built was
visualized using rviz. Rviz (ROS visualization) is a 3D visualizer for displaying sensor data and state
information from ROS. Using rviz, user can display live representations of sensor values coming over
ROS Topics including camera data, infrared distance measurements, sonar data, and more. It even has
the ability to display a robot configuration on a virtual model of the robot. The scan result is displayed
in rviz as shown in figure 4.

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International Symposium on Materials and Electrical Engineering (ISMEE) 2017 IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 384 (2018) 012058 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/384/1/012058
1234567890‘’“”

Figure 4. Scan Result in rviz.

The overall cost spent to build the rotating lidar is $195, with the detail presented in table 1.
Table 1. Cost Spent.
Component Unit price ($) Quantity needed Subtotal Cost
Lidar-Lite V3 150 1 150
Stepper Motor 10 1 10
Stepper Driver 3 1 3
Arduino Nano 10 1 10
Bluetooth set 10 1 10
Li ion Battery 2 2 4
3D Printed Housing 8 1 8

4. Conclusions
Presented in this paper a design for a ROS compatible rotating lidar or laser scanner, based on the easy
off the shelf part, with the overall cost under $195. As for the improvement, an encoder could be
added to ensure that there is no glitch in the rotation that lead to a valid consistent scan result. Another
improvement possible is to add an IMU, so with an appropriate software enhancement the unit can be
used as a basic sensor to perform simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM).

Acknowledgement
This paper is a result of research conducted using Penelitian Dosen Pemula grant, contract number
PDP-039/SP3/LPP-UAD/IV/2017.

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International Symposium on Materials and Electrical Engineering (ISMEE) 2017 IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 384 (2018) 012058 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/384/1/012058
1234567890‘’“”

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