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Calling the ik solver through a service call should work for converting pose goals into joint goals, which only needs to happen once or a few times (if sampling in goal regions) during planning. For planning in task space - for instance, when it is desired that the end effector of the robot maintain a particular pitch and roll during the movement such that a glass is not upended - the ik solver will need to be called thousands of times, and the time required for calling even a persistent service will likely be orders of magnitude more than the cost of computation ik using ik fast, which should be microseconds. Using pure C++ for the plugin is definitely the way to go in terms of efficiency.

My hope is in the near future we at willow can make it very easy to use ikfast as a generic ik solver, and again if you pursue this path we'd love some pointers.