Getting Started with Lidar Acquisition in MATLAB

This video shows how to quickly get started acquiring live lidar data from Velodyne LiDAR® sensors into MATLAB®. It covers connecting to hardware, reading data, and performing analysis on lidar point clouds.

With your Velodyne hardware connected to your computer, you can test the connection using the third-party VeloView software. Then in MATLAB, you can connect directly to the hardware using the velodynelidar function.

Once you’ve connected to the hardware from MATLAB, you can read point clouds using the read command or stream point clouds to a buffer using the start and stop commands. You can also perform live analysis while streaming point cloud data into MATLAB.

MATLAB toolboxes provide many point cloud processing functions for different applications. With just a few lines of code, these functions and their corresponding examples can be applied to point clouds acquired live from Velodyne LiDAR sensors.

The functionality shown in this video requires Image Acquisition Toolbox™ as well as Image Acquisition Toolbox Support Package for Velodyne LiDAR Sensors, which can be downloaded from the Add-On Explorer in MATLAB.

Velodyne LiDAR Support from Image Acquisition Toolbox: https://bit.ly/2YiHadx