Polka v0.5 release highlights and upgrade notes

[Panav]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on this for a while, and I’m really excited to announce the release of Polka v0.5.0!

Above: 3 Robosense Airy Lidars, deskewing and voxel+range filter enabled.

If a set of points is not useful to you, it shouldn’t waste compute propagating via DDS and increasing the compute of your pipeline downstream.

Polka is a node that does all your lidar processing 2D or 3D in one efficient package, merge a 2D cloud or scan, flag sensor sync/drop issues, filtering by your need, full QoS control, deskewing with a single lidar+imu, deskewing with multiple decentralized sources and IMU, deskewing with sensors on moving joints polka does it all.

Here is a breakdown of what’s new and why I think you’ll love it:

The Dashboard

Shows and flags any sensor issues, current b/w, topic frequency, deployed configuration and warnings (you can also choose to disable it for a classic logger).

Performance gains and better IMU handling

• Deskew is ~6.2x faster: By utilizing coarse-stride SE(3) rotation interpolation, per-source deskew latency drops from ~9.8 ms to ~1.6 ms.

• Angular filtering is ~3x faster: The CPU angular filter drops per-point atan2 bettering tick time from 10.47 ms to 3.55 ms at 259k points (3 robosense lidars).

• Smarter IMU Estimation: Deskew now estimates body-frame gravity via EMA when the IMU reports no orientation, meaning gravity-aware deskewing works beautifully even on cheaper IMUs.

Thanks to @Kyrie_James for addressing a bug in Robosense Airy which enabled better angular deskewing.

Tune It While It Runs

You can now change parameters on a live node without needing a restart. A two-phase apply process keeps the pipeline completely consistent while swapping configurations in the background. Paired with a new /diagnostics stream, you get timing-drift and rate-drift flags the exact moment a source starts to sag.

Five Distros

Polka now fully supports Iron, Kilted, and Lyrical, joining Humble and Jazzy.

Scripts to measure performance metrics and documentation is included in the repository.

Upgrade Notes for Current Users:

• suppress_duplicate_timestamps and diagnostics.enabled default to true

• The node has been heavily refactored internally for readability and extension, but existing configs and launch files will continue to work perfectly without modifications.

You can check out the full release, dive into the new detailed configuration docs, and see the demos over at the repository: github.com/Pana1v/polka.

Cheers,

Panav