We have recently added a new interface for virtual range image sensors that publishes the result in a pointcloud. So the result is a pointcloud with distances from the camera frame to the nearest obstacle for each point. It is similar to a kinect sensor but take into account kinect sensors do not work underwater!. The sensor has perfect output and even underwater particles have been disabled for it because they produced a strange cloud of noise at a fixed distance. We hope to add an appropriate pattern of noise in the future.

In order to use it just add an interface linked to the virtual range image sensor like this in your rosinterfaces XML section:

<RangeCameraToPCL>
  <cameraName>rangeImage</cameraName>
  <topic> /uwsim/rangepcd </topic>
</RangeCameraToPCL>