Similar to the Sweep LIDAR, RPLIDAR (http://www.slamtec.com/en/lidar) is another low-cost LIDAR for hobby projects. RPLIDAR and Sweep have the same applications, SLAM and autonomous navigation.
There is an ROS driver for interfacing the RPLIDAR with ROS. The ROS package can be found at http://wiki.ros.org/rplidar. The GitHub link of the package is https://github.com/robopeak/rplidar_ros.
Now that we have learned how to interface self-driving car sensors in ROS, we will simulate a self-driving car with sensors in Gazebo.