Examining the Point Cloud

Now that you can see what the lidar rays look like, what about the actual point cloud data that you will be using and processing? You can view the point cloud data using the renderPointCloud function in render. You can also choose to turn off the rendering for the highway scene so you can see what the point cloud looks like by itself.

The result in the image above is without noise and with lidar minDistance set to zero. With a high lidar minDistance , you can remove the points above that are hitting the roof of your car, since these won't help you detect other cars. Also, some noise variance helps to create more interesting looking point clouds. Additionally, adding noise will help you to develop more robust point processing functions.

Exercise

Now you will view the lidar's point cloud by itself, without the rays.

• To do this, call renderPointCloud instead of renderRays in the simpleHighway function.
• You can also view the point cloud without obstacles by setting renderScene to false in environment.cpp .

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

Solution