ROS nodes

Point Cloud IO

https://github.com/ANYbotics/point_cloud_io

  • two nodes for reading and writing PointCloud2 from/to ply, pcd formats

point_cloud_assembler from laser_assembler

http://wiki.ros.org/laser_assembler

This node assembles a stream of sensor_msgs/PointCloud2 messages into larger point clouds. The aggregated point cloud can be accessed via a call to assemble_scans service.

https://github.com/ros-perception/laser_assembler

Tutorial

Octomap

http://octomap.github.io/

Seems like a standard solution to convert point clouds to a map in several formats

pointcloud_to_laserscan

http://wiki.ros.org/pointcloud_to_laserscan

pcl_ros

http://wiki.ros.org/pcl_ros

This package provides interfaces and tools for bridging a running ROS system to the Point Cloud Library. These include ROS nodelets, nodes, and C++ interfaces.

It contains for example pointcloud_to_pcd, pcd_to_pointcloud, bag_to_pcd.