Don’t recall if we have told you about what many of us consider to be one of the best books to quickly get a great feel for the many components of ROS navigation.
I feel you would very much enjoy and have a great time by looking at the most excellent pdf version of a book by Patrick Goebel (highly respected ROS person). The book is called ‘ROS By Example’.
It is an excellent fast paced way to really dig in on a great many of the things you are asking about and would be really a book you would greatly benefit from and learn a great deal. Look for version 1.1.0 and in a quick search I found it in a few places but here is one place: http://file.ncnynl.com/ros/ros_by_example_v1_indigo.pdf
The whole book is great but you know a lot of it perhaps by now. Still it is worth getting Patrick’s views and teaching. For the specific navigation questions you have been asking I suggest chapters 7 and 8 from the book for sure of great value. I feel you would greatly enjoy and is recommended to anyone trying to work with ROS and robots.
We are just about ready to release another example that is based on use of an RPLIDAR with the Magni and that will be targeted towards many of our users of Magni that often ask questions about Lidar based navigation. I will post back to here once we release the lidar example.
We do not have a point cloud demo planned at this time but it is likely in perhaps the next year although it is likely to be based on somthing newer than the Kinect.