Creating the Lidar Object

The first thing you are going to do is create a lidar object. The lidar object is defined by the src/sensors/lidar.h header file which is included at the top of environment.cpp. Also in environment.cpp is the simpleHighway function, which takes a reference argument for the PCL visualizer viewer that was discussed previously.

Exercise Instructions

You will instantiate a pointer to a Lidar object in the simpleHighway function.
You should create the Lidar pointer object on the heap, using the new keyword.
The Lidar constructor takes two arguments: cars and the slope of the ground - these arguments are necessary for modeling ray collisions. The Lidar object should be created with a slope of 0.

Note

The lidar arguments are necessary for modeling ray collisions.
The Lidar object is going to be holding point cloud data which could be very large. By instatinating on the heap, we have more memory to work with than the 2MB on the stack. However, it takes longer to look up objects on the heap, while stack lookup is very fast.

Solution