Introduction to Ouster Digital Lidar

OUSTER is building digital lidar sensors for autonomy in the Industrial, Smart Infrastructure, Robotics, and Automotive markets. Join us to learn more about what we’re building.

Technical Documentation

The Ouster sensor documentation is meant to allow the users to take advantage of all the features that are available with Ouster Sensors.

Quick links:

• What’s in the box

• Quick Start Guide

• Sensor Data

• TCP API Guide (Deprecated) & HTTP API Reference Guide

• Supporting Guides, such as

  • Networking Guide

  • Thermal Integration Guide and many more

• Hardware User Manual

  • OS0 - Rev7

  • OS1 - Rev7

  • OS2 - Rev7

  • OSDome - Rev7

Note

Firmware 3.x and later has a minimum hardware requirement (Rev7 and later for OS0, OS1 & OSDome). Hardware User Manual for other revisions (Rev C, D, 05 & 06) can be found on Ouster Downloads.

Sample Data

Note

All Ouster sample data is provided under the CC BY-NC-SA license, whether obtained through the above links or from the Ouster website.

Visualize recorded data:

• OS0 128 Rev 07 Urban Drive (2048x10 Dual Returns)

• OS1 128 Rev 07 Urban Drive (2048x10 Dual Returns)

• OS0 128 Rev7 Urban Drive (1024x10 Dual Returns)

• OS1 128 Rev7 Urban Drive (1024x10 Dual Returns)

• OS2 128 Rev7 Highway Drive (Dual Returns)

Note

Users can also download the data using the Ouster Data App. Please use the link provided above and navigate to the Download tab on the right top corner of your screen.

User Interface- Data App

Note

Ouster presents sample data collected in the latest released firmware in this document, if you need sample data for a particular version of firmware please contact Ouster’s Team.

Visualizing and Interacting with an Ouster Sensor

Once the sensor is connected, the user can visualize the point cloud using Ouster Python SDK or using Ouster Studio . Both Ouster Python SDK and Ouster Studio are available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Please visit Ouster Resources for the latest tools to visualize your sensor’s output.

Ouster Python SDK

Ouster Python SDK provides a high-level interface for interacting with sensor hardware and record sensor data suitable for prototyping, evaluation, and other non-safety critical applications. Example and reference code is provided for several common operations on sensor data. he SDK includes APIs for:

• Querying and setting sensor configuration

• Recording and reading data in pcap format

• Reading and buffering sensor UDP data streams reliably

• Frame-based access to lidar data as numpy datatypes

• Conversion of raw data to range/signal/near_ir/reflectivity images (de-staggering)

• Efficient projection of range measurements to Cartesian (X, Y, Z) coordinates

Ouster Studio

Ouster Studio is an application provided by Ouster to visualize, record, and analyze data from Ouster lidar sensors. Ouster Studio is cross-platform, with official support for Windows, MacOS and Ubuntu. The software performs real-time visualization, processing, and recording of live 3D lidar data captured from Ouster lidar sensors.