The Velodyne LIDAR is becoming an integral part of a self-driving car. Because of high demand, there are enough software modules available for working with this sensor. We are going to simulate two popular models of Velodyne, called HDL-32E and VLP-16. Let's see how to do it in ROS and Gazebo.

In ROS-Kinetic and Indigo, we can install from a binary package or compile from source code. Here is the command to install Velodyne packages on ROS Kinetic:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-velodyne-simulator

In ROS Indigo, just replace the ROS distribution name:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-velodyne-simulator

To install it from source code, just clone the source package to the ROS workspace using the following command:

$ git clone https://bitbucket.org/DataspeedInc/velodyne_simulator.git

After cloning the package, you can build it using the catkin_make command. Here is the ROS wiki page of the Velodyne simulator:

http://wiki.ros.org/velodyne_simulator

So you are...