We're using ROS as the basis of our software development for three vehicles this year at the UCF Robotics Club. While the vehicles are being built, we've had access to a Turtlebot for prototyping and exploring ROS functionality.
Part of this process required replacing the Kinect that comes with the Turtlebot with a real LIDAR for laser scan data. Apart from the growing pains with understanding robot specifications that ROS requires (urdf files and such) we found that existing documentation for this process is either terribly out of date (2+ years with most information pertaining to Groovy) or inadequate (specifically when getting Hokuyo simulation working in Gazebo). I'd like to explain how we combined existing tutorials and guides to get everything working nicely.
