I'm running a simulation with the PR2 in Gazebo, and spawning a simple box into the arena, but I'm having problems with the laser scan data that is being returned. Most of the time it returns all of the intensities to be 101.0. This includes the actual laser hits and the 'infinite' values.

However, sometimes, the actual laser hits will have really high intensities. 6.891205523847898e+24 to be precise. This causes all sorts of problems in my navigation pipeline since there's a filter in place to filter anything out over 10000.

Questions:

1. Why does Gazebo return such high values?
2. Why would it do so only intermittently? <rant>Do you realize how long I thought this was a concurrency issue within navigation?!</rant>

Stats:

• Gazebo - 1.9.0
• ROS - Groovy
• This in an empty_world except for the PR2 and a box. Using standard PR2 plugins.