Introduction to Ouster Digital Lidar | Ouster Sensor Docs

Ouster is building digital lidar sensors for autonomy in the Industrial, Smart Infrastructure, Robotics, and Automotive markets.

Important Safety & Legal Information

Class 1 laser classification, regulatory notices, and safety symbols.

Quick Start Guide

What’s in the box, and how to power, connect, and configure a sensor for the first time.

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.

Firmware

Data formats, sensor features, networking, and the API, for v4.0 and v3.2.

Hardware

Mechanical drawings, operating limits, and electrical specifications, by model.

Integration Guides

Thermal integration and enhanced ingress protection for sensor installations.

Sample Data

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

Visualize recorded data:

Recording	Sensor	Mode
Urban drive	OS0-128 Rev 7	2048x10, dual returns
Urban drive	OS1-128 Rev 7	2048x10, dual returns
Urban drive	OS0-128 Rev 7	1024x10, dual returns
Urban drive	OS1-128 Rev 7	1024x10, dual returns
Highway drive	OS2-128 Rev 7	Dual returns

Each link opens the recording in the Ouster Data App, where it can also be downloaded from the Download tab in the top right corner of the screen.

The Ouster Data App user interface

Ouster presents sample data collected on the latest released firmware. If you need sample data for a particular firmware version, please contact Ouster’s team.

Visualizing and Interacting with an Ouster Sensor

Once the sensor is connected, you can visualize the point cloud using the Ouster SDK or Ouster Studio. Both are available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Visit Ouster Resources for the latest tools to visualize your sensor’s output.

Ouster SDK

The Ouster SDK provides a high-level interface for interacting with sensor hardware and recording 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. The 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, and 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. It performs real-time visualization, processing, and recording of live 3D lidar data captured from Ouster lidar sensors, with official support for Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu.