feat(Ouster): add ouster lidar support by Samahu · Pull Request #456 · tier4/nebula

Samahu · 2026-06-18T21:51:12Z

PR Type

New Feature

Description

The PR resolves all the complaints around the previous attempts, #422, #436, #440. It reduces the number of files required to add support to ouster from 500+ to less than 200 files including the decoders code

In addition, this PR update to ouster-sdk 0.16.2 which adds support for REV8 hardware and color lidar support.
The being said, the driver doesn't yet parse and publish color information even when the sensor supports it.

Review Procedure

You no longer need to pull submodules
You can build the branch using the following command:

colcon build --symlink-install --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=1 --packages-up-to nebula_ouster

Edit the provided sensor_model.param.yaml and set the sensor_ip and dest_ip to match your environment
Launch the sensor using the command

ros2 launch nebula_ouster ouster_launch_all_hw.xml sensor_model:=ouster_sensor

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Commits are properly organized and messages are according to the guideline
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PR title describes the changes

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All open points are addressed and tracked via issues or tickets

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Samahu · 2026-06-18T22:21:17Z

With regard to sample bag files, I already provided one for FW 3.2 in this comment: #436 (comment)

I will upload one soon for FW 4.0

mojomex · 2026-06-19T06:08:54Z

@Samahu Thank you! Given ROS buildfarm issues with submodules / .repos / FetchContent, the vendored SDK indeed seems like the best option.

Just some very minor feedback before diving into the review:

The Autoware project (which we are closely aligned with) uses a convention where lib is project-owned library code, and vendor is used to mark vendored code, so I'd prefer lib/ouster-sdk be renamed to vendor/ouster-sdk.
Linters like pre-commit and spell-check-differential are currently scanning ouster-sdk and auto-fixing it which is not desired, since it's vendored code. Could you try and exclude vendor/* dirs from those linters?
Could you add a small script, or README section on how to update the vendored Ouster SDK? I feel it is important for maintainers to effortlessly upgrade/pull in any fixes from upstream.

Thank you for your continued cooperation!

codecov · 2026-06-19T06:16:45Z

Codecov Report

❌ Patch coverage is 24.22907% with 344 lines in your changes missing coverage. Please review.
✅ Project coverage is 24.22%. Comparing base (50b6a0b) to head (4c2a64f).
⚠️ Report is 1 commits behind head on main.

❌ Your patch check has failed because the patch coverage (24.22%) is below the target coverage (80.00%). You can increase the patch coverage or adjust the target coverage.

Additional details and impacted files

@@             Coverage Diff             @@
##             main     #456       +/-   ##
===========================================
- Coverage   40.18%   24.22%   -15.96%     
===========================================
  Files         132        9      -123     
  Lines       10293      454     -9839     
  Branches     5402      139     -5263     
===========================================
- Hits         4136      110     -4026     
+ Misses       3799      340     -3459     
+ Partials     2358        4     -2354

Flag	Coverage Δ
nebula_ouster	`24.22% <24.22%> (?)`
nebula_ouster_common	`24.22% <24.22%> (?)`
nebula_ouster_decoders	`24.22% <24.22%> (?)`
nebula_ouster_hw_interfaces	`24.22% <24.22%> (?)`
total	`?`

Flags with carried forward coverage won't be shown. Click here to find out more.

🚀 New features to boost your workflow:

❄️ Test Analytics: Detect flaky tests, report on failures, and find test suite problems.

Samahu · 2026-06-19T16:06:56Z

@Samahu Thank you! Given ROS buildfarm issues with submodules / .repos / FetchContent, the vendored SDK indeed seems like the best option.

Just some very minor feedback before diving into the review:

The Autoware project (which we are closely aligned with) uses a convention where lib is project-owned library code, and vendor is used to mark vendored code, so I'd prefer lib/ouster-sdk be renamed to vendor/ouster-sdk.

Linters like pre-commit and spell-check-differential are currently scanning ouster-sdk and auto-fixing it which is not desired, since it's vendored code. Could you try and exclude vendor/* dirs from those linters?

Could you add a small script, or README section on how to update the vendored Ouster SDK? I feel it is important for maintainers to effortlessly upgrade/pull in any fixes from upstream.

Thank you for your continued cooperation!

At @mojomex I have resolved all the above comments.

Samahu · 2026-06-19T16:08:18Z

Note that I went back to the moment before pre-commit-ci[autofix] did formatting edits the the sdk code and started from there.

mojomex

Thank you! I think this is already really close to what we imagined. I left a few small comments and will test behavior once they are addressed. Please also add an Ouster section to docs/ - just supported sensors and their params, similar to the other vendors are enough.

Please let me know if anything is unclear about Nebula's internal interfaces etc.

Samahu · 2026-06-23T05:57:34Z

I have resolved 70-80% of the comments .. The CI fails due to spell-check, the majority of these spell checks stems from ouster-sdk code .. but we decided to minimize edits to ouster-sdk code.. The Github workflow pulls the spell-check rules from an external URL (in autoware) .. how should I approach this problem?

mojomex · 2026-06-25T04:25:39Z

@Samahu Thank you for addressing the feedback! For spell-check, don't worry about it - I'll PR a fix to your branch.

Samahu · 2026-06-25T05:34:50Z

Ok, I pushed another update wiring OusterCalibrationData between ouster-ros-wrapper package and the decoder. The http sensor communication is now done completely outside of the decoder code.

Samahu · 2026-06-29T16:10:54Z

Ok, I pushed another update wiring OusterCalibrationData between ouster-ros-wrapper package and the decoder. The http sensor communication is now done completely outside of the decoder code.

There was a pre-commit.ci - pr check that was failing that I did not notice before but I have that fixed. Let me know if there is anything missing on our part to proceed with PR getting merged.

Samahu · 2026-07-01T13:36:05Z

I have resolved the failing codecov checks by adding ^/vendor* to the exclusion list and rebased the branch at the same time. Can we run the CI again to verify these changes resolve the issue and see if there are more?

Samahu · 2026-07-07T15:16:48Z

any update

marioney · 2026-07-09T13:09:32Z

Hi @Samahu thanks for this. We're also interested in this Feature and are willing to test it in our setup.

The CI build failed because find_package(libzip REQUIRED) was resolving to the system libzip-config.cmake, which references /usr/bin/zipcmp (from the libzip-tools package, not installed in CI). Fix: prepend the ouster-sdk cmake directory to CMAKE_MODULE_PATH before the find_package call so that the bundled Findlibzip.cmake (which uses pkg-config to find libzip and avoids the broken targets) is used instead.

…unch file

… minor syntax suggestions

… ouster packages

…hout tests - Add explicit patch status (target: 80%, threshold: 5%) to prevent default patch check from failing on new code - Add src/nebula_ouster/.* to ignore list since ouster packages don't have CI test infrastructure yet

- Add test_ouster_decoder.cpp with tests for: - Empty packet error handling - Callback not set error handling - Invalid packet size error handling - Valid lidar packet decode - Set/replace pointcloud callback - Lidar packet size getter - DecodeError to_cstr conversion - Performance counters recording - Move construction - Add test_ouster_calibration_data.cpp with tests for: - Load from string (success and empty) - Load from file (success, not found, empty) - Save to file (success and invalid path) - Update CMakeLists.txt for both packages to register tests - Add test dependencies to package.xml files - Fix BUILD_TESTING save/restore around ouster-sdk subdirectory - Revert nebula_ouster exclusion from .codecov.yml

Samahu · 2026-07-09T21:01:11Z

resolved codecov complaints and rebased again

Samahu · 2026-07-13T00:33:04Z

Can we run the CI one more time to confirm the codecov has been fixed?

mojomex

Apologies for the long wait and thank you for your patience! We were quite swamped internally 🙇

Code is looking really good, no new feedback!
One small build change I'd like to request:

In CI, we're using colcon build --packages-up-to to build Nebula, which works for this PR. However, many projects using Nebula are just using colcon build, and that fails:

Starting >>> ouster-sdk
--- stderr: ouster-sdk
CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:92 (add_subdirectory):
  add_subdirectory given source "ouster_pcap" which is not an existing
  directory.


CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:96 (add_subdirectory):
  add_subdirectory given source "ouster_osf" which is not an existing
  directory.


CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:97 (add_subdirectory):
  add_subdirectory given source "thirdparty/zpng" which is not an existing
  directory.


CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:102 (add_subdirectory):
  add_subdirectory given source "ouster_viz" which is not an existing
  directory.


CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:106 (add_subdirectory):
  add_subdirectory given source "ouster_mapping" which is not an existing
  directory.


---
Failed   <<< ouster-sdk [0.79s, exited with code 1]

Upon closer inspection, the src/nebula_ouster/vendor/ouster-sdk/CMakeLists.txt doesn't seem to be used at all. Instead, nebula_ouster_decoders etc. point to the SDK paths they need.

Possible fixes are:

remove the CMakeLists.txt so Colcon doesn't recognize it as a package
place a COLCON_IGNORE file in src/nebula_ouster/vendor/
make the package buildable and link nebula_ouster_... against the built SDK

Also, since there's no default calibration data, I was not able to test on the packets from #436 (comment) . I saw that the unit tests are using ouster::sdk::core::default_sensor_info(ouster::sdk::core::LidarMode::_512x10) to get some generic data. Is it possible to make this an official fallback when no calibration data exists?

mojomex · 2026-07-13T06:35:06Z

+          max_hz: 12.0
+        num_frame_transition: 1
+      packet_liveness:
+        timeout_ms: 1000


(nit) I think this is fine not to expose to users. We usually know that the min. frequency of the sensor is e.g. 10Hz (100ms period), so any threshold at or below that is fine. Too low and we run into scheduling effects, so I'd set it to 100ms for now.

I found this same issue, building the package fails due to the subfolders missing.

Even if I change the lines in the CMakeLists.txt to disable those options I get a large list of additional errors regarding the ouster_json.hpp

... --- stderr: ouster-sdk In file included from /workspaces/autoware_iv/src/sensor_component/external/nebula/src/nebula_ouster/vendor/ouster-sdk/ouster_client/src/sensor_info.cpp:14: /workspaces/autoware_iv/src/sensor_component/external/nebula/src/nebula_ouster/vendor/ouster-sdk/thirdparty/ouster_json.hpp:102:25: error: ‘is_same_vz’ is not a member of ‘std’; did you mean ‘is_same’? 102 | !std::is_same_vz<std::decay_t<T>, json> && | ^~~~~~~~~~ | is_same ....

mojomex · 2026-07-13T07:29:48Z

@marioney Hey, that's awesome to hear! It would mean a lot to us if you could test this PR with your Ouster sensor and comment if it was successful, or if there were any issues that need addressing.

mojomex · 2026-07-13T07:32:31Z

@Samahu Not for this PR, but has Ouster previously looked into packaging Ouster SDK for ROS buildfarm? There's quite a few _vendor packages for other libraries, and it would potentially be a nice solution to our submodule vs. FetchContent vs. copy discussion.

Samahu · 2026-07-13T15:11:43Z

@Samahu Not for this PR, but has Ouster previously looked into packaging Ouster SDK for ROS buildfarm? There's quite a few _vendor packages for other libraries, and it would potentially be a nice solution to our submodule vs. FetchContent vs. copy discussion.

I don't see it happening in the near term. Unfortunately.

This was referenced Jun 18, 2026

feat(Ouster): implement nebula's Ouster port as a submodule #436

Closed

feat(ouster): add native Ouster lidar driver #440

Open

Samahu changed the title ~~feat(Ouster): Add ouster lidar support~~ feat(Ouster): add ouster lidar support Jun 18, 2026

Samahu marked this pull request as ready for review June 19, 2026 16:07

mojomex requested review from drwnz and mojomex June 22, 2026 07:12

mojomex reviewed Jun 22, 2026

View reviewed changes

Samahu requested a review from mojomex June 23, 2026 05:58

Copilot AI mentioned this pull request Jul 1, 2026

fix: resolve json-schema-check and codecov failures for ouster packages Samahu/nebula#9

Merged

Samahu force-pushed the add-ouster-lidar-support branch from a07d7b3 to 17e16c2 Compare July 1, 2026 13:34

Copilot AI mentioned this pull request Jul 9, 2026

Add unit tests for ouster decoder and calibration to pass codecov checks Samahu/nebula#10

Merged

Samahu and others added 7 commits July 9, 2026 13:56

Set main body of the driver

22bdef4

add ouster-sdk

780a02f

Working implementation of Ouster Lidar Nebula driver

9c036bc

Add COLCON_IGNORE to ouster-sdk sophus thirdparty to fix CI

72f9439

Add curl as a dependency and Use PkgConfig to import libzip

7850b51

Fix stringop-overflow error

2fe2140

pre-commit-ci Bot and others added 21 commits July 9, 2026 13:56

ci(pre-commit): autofix

1418e84

Remove the sensor_model param and drop the redundent nebula_ouster la…

125656e

…unch file

Use a standalone node instead of a node container in launch

9dd6fa5

Remove use_sensor_extrinsics option

d948735

Use the provided normalize_angle method

581837d

ci(pre-commit): autofix

21a3148

Add comments about warnings and libcurl/libssl usage

bf85bcd

ci(pre-commit): autofix

6f82413

Use assert to verify online mode within receive_cloud_packet_callback

554fded

ci(pre-commit): autofix

d3e6f44

Move curl, libssl and libzip to ouster-ros-wrapper node + handle othe…

b0fb218

… minor syntax suggestions

ci(pre-commit): autofix

3828e24

ci(pre-commit): autofix

09d7804

Implement the calibration data serialization/deserialization logic

ed6d4ca

ci(pre-commit): autofix

960746e

Add missing includes

eca9b4f

fix: add calibration_file to ouster schema and fix codecov config for…

a789950

… ouster packages

Fix logging.h etc commits

e65f361

ci(pre-commit): autofix

0d9b29e

Samahu force-pushed the add-ouster-lidar-support branch from 1ab3019 to 0d9b29e Compare July 9, 2026 20:56

Address cpplint issues

5bb6e9c

Fix build failure in test

4c2a64f

mojomex reviewed Jul 13, 2026

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Samahu commented Jun 18, 2026

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