Ilia Ovsiannikov Offers Simple Lidar Control with a New, Open Source Arduino LDS Library

Maker Ilia Ovsiannikov is working on a friendly do-it-yourself robot kit — and as part of that work has released a library to make it easier to use a range of lidar sensors in your Arduino sketches.

"I have combined support for various spinning lidar/LDS sensors into an Arduino LDS library with a single platform API [Application Programming Interface]," Ovsiannikov explains. "You can install this library from the Arduino Library Manager GUI. Why support many lidar/LDS sensors? The reason is to make the hardware — supported by [the] Kaia.ai platform — affordable to as many prospective users as possible. Some of the sensors [suported] are sold as used robot vacuum cleaner spare parts and cost as low as $16 or so (including shipping)."

The library delivers support for a broad range of lidar sensors from a unified API, Ovsiannikov explains, meaning it's not only possible to get started quickly but to switch sensors mid-project — should existing sensors become unavailable, or pricing shift to favor a different model. It also adds a few neat features of its own, including pulse-width modulation (PWM) control of lidar motors that lack their own control system, using optional adapter boards.

While the library is usable standalone, and even to perform real-time angle and distance computation directly on an Arduino microcontroller, Ovsiannikov has also published a companion package to tie it in to the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2). "[The] Kaia.ai robot firmware forwards LDS raw data — obtained from the Arduino LDS library — to a PC running ROS2 and micro-ROS," he explains. "The ROS2 PC kaiaai_telemetry package receives the raw LDS data, decodes that data and publishes it to the ROS2 /scan topic."

More information on the library is available in Ovsiannikov's blog post, while the library itself is available on GitHub under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.