My previous blog post described how to build PCL on Ubunut 14.04 LTS.  Now Ubuntu has advanced to 16.04 LTS and PCL to version 1.8, so this post is dedicated to making this upgrade simple.

Update: a prebuilt DEB file for PCL 1.8 for Ubunut 16.04 is available here. To install it, do

sudo dpkg -i PCL-1.8.0-Linux.deb

Now, if you like to try build it yourself, continue.

Setup Prerequisites

To prepare the software development on Ubuntu we need setup some prerequisite tools:

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install git build-essential linux-libc-dev sudo apt-get install cmake cmake-gui sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev libusb-dev libudev-dev sudo apt-get install mpi-default-dev openmpi-bin openmpi-common sudo apt-get install libflann1.8 libflann-dev sudo apt-get install libeigen3-dev sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev sudo apt-get install libvtk5.10-qt4 libvtk5.10 libvtk5-dev sudo apt-get install libqhull* libgtest-dev sudo apt-get install freeglut3-dev pkg-config sudo apt-get install libxmu-dev libxi-dev sudo apt-get install mono-complete sudo apt-get install qt-sdk openjdk-8-jdk openjdk-8-jre

Build Point Cloud Library

Point Cloud Library is obtained by:

git clone https://github.com/PointCloudLibrary/pcl.git

Now you should find pcl in your directory.  Go into it and create a release directory and follow the cmake build process:

cd pcl mkdir release cd release cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=None -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr \ -DBUILD_GPU=ON -DBUILD_apps=ON -DBUILD_examples=ON \ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr .. make

The make will take some time, so go get a cup of coffee or take that long overdue shower.  Once the build finishes, install it by:

sudo make install