Adjusting Lidar Parameters

You can orbit and move around the scene to see the different rays that are being cast. The current lidar settings will limit what you can do, however. The resolution is low, and as you can see from the scene, only one of the rays is touching a car. So The next task for you will be to increase your lidar's resolution so you can clearly see the other cars around. To do this, follow the instructions from the TODO statements in lidar.h.

The changes include increasing the minimum distance so you don't include contact points from the roof of your car, increasing both the horizontal and vertical angle resolution, and finally, adding noise. The noise you will be adding is actually quite high since units are meters, but it will yield more interesting and realistic point data in the scene. Also feel completely free to experiment and play around with these lidar hyper parameters!

Exercise

• Now you will increase lidar resolution by increasing the number of vertical layers and the angular resolution around the z-axis.
  • numLayers should change from 3 to 8.
  • horizontalLayerIncrement should change from pi/6 to pi/64.
• Set minDistance to 5 (meters) to remove points from your vehicle's roof.
• Add noise, around 0.2 to get a more interesting pcd.

When you are finished with the exercise, your output should look like the image below.

Solution