A New Way to Interact with PointCloud2 Messages

The current way to read and modify PointCloud2 messages is to use the PointCloud2Iterator and PointCloud2Modifier classes. These classes are very flexible, but also error prone as the user must guarantee that the fields put into the message are exactly the ones being read from it. In this talk, we present an alternative class PointCloudMsgWrapper (available as open-source and on the ROS 2 build farm) that alleviates this issue. It guarantees that the data is written and read in exactly the same way. We show how this class can be used, and guide the user through some implementation details.