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Not an answer and FYI: RViz is only a visualisation tool. This may sound pedantic, but RViz does not do any planning, modelling or any such tasks. It only visualises data streams, either on their own or with the help of some other things like meshes, FK/IK, etc.
Reason I post this comment ..
| | 2 | No.2 Revision |
Not an answer and FYI: First (and FYI): RViz is only a visualisation tool. This may sound pedantic, but RViz does not do any planning, modelling or any such tasks. It only visualises data streams, either on their own or with the help of some other things like meshes, FK/IK, etc.
Reason I post add this comment ..
But doesn't Moveit, the RViz plugin, do path planning?
No. MoveIt is not an RViz plugin.
The "MoveIt RViz Plugin" is an RViz plugin, but that is a stand-alone extension to RViz that allows it to be used as a programmers/debugging interface for MoveIt and visualises the outputs of the planning process that MoveIt performs for you.
MoveIt itself is a stand-alone library and set of tools (and a ROS node tying that all together for you and providing topic, service and action interfaces to that functionality) that together support motion planning tasks, potentially for ROS enabled robots -- but even that is not a strict requirement.
Again, this may sound pedantic, but it's really important to understand that there is direct link between RViz and any of these tools or any requirement to use them together.
As to your question: perhaps libraries like Tesseract, Descartes (bit older) and/or Noether can help. Also look at Godel milestone 4 (Milestone 5 is being planned).
Can I create a mesh from the points and use it as a collision object or something?
that would probably be a good thing to do, seeing as it would enable the mentioned planners to take the surface into account for collision avoidance, but it isn't needed for the bare motion planning task.
You "just" setup a scene (including your robot + EEF descriptions), provide the planners with the set of "waypoints" you want your EEF to follow, set up tolerances (some processes are 5D, while your robot is 6D) and start the planning process. That gets you a path. Post-process into a trajectory, and either use a live connection with a robot to execute the path (possibly with feedback on how the robot is doing) or generate an off-line RAPID program from that trajectory and upload it using whatever means you have available (see Godel for the "upload RAPID program" approach).
PS: if you're in the US -- and I have a hunch you are -- you might want to get in touch with SwRI (Texas). Specifically Matt Robinson of the Manufacturing Robotics & Technologies Department. They have a lot of experience with the use of ROS in the type of applications I believe you are looking at.
| | 3 | No.3 Revision |
First (and FYI): RViz is only a visualisation tool. This may sound pedantic, but RViz does not do any planning, modelling or any such tasks. It only visualises data streams, either on their own or with the help of some other things like meshes, FK/IK, etc.
Reason I add this comment is because it doesn't make much sense to search for RViz + "such functionality".
But doesn't Moveit, the RViz plugin, do path planning?
No. MoveIt is not an RViz plugin.
The "MoveIt RViz Plugin" is an RViz plugin, but that is a stand-alone extension to RViz that allows it to be used as a programmers/debugging interface for MoveIt and visualises the outputs of the planning process that MoveIt performs for you.
MoveIt itself is a stand-alone library and set of tools (and a ROS node tying that all together for you and providing topic, service and action interfaces to that functionality) that together support motion planning tasks, potentially for ROS enabled robots -- but even that is not a strict requirement.
Again, this may sound pedantic, but it's really important to understand that there is no direct link between RViz and any of these tools or nor any requirement to use them together.
As to your question: perhaps libraries like Tesseract, Descartes (bit older) and/or Noether can help. Also look at Godel milestone 4 (Milestone 5 is being planned).
Can I create a mesh from the points and use it as a collision object or something?
that would probably be a good thing to do, seeing as it would enable the mentioned planners to take the surface into account for collision avoidance, but it isn't needed for the bare motion planning task.
You "just" setup a scene (including your robot + EEF descriptions), provide the planners with the set of "waypoints" you want your EEF to follow, set up tolerances (some processes are 5D, while your robot is 6D) and start the planning process. That gets you a path. Post-process into a trajectory, and either use a live connection with a robot to execute the path (possibly with feedback on how the robot is doing) or generate an off-line RAPID program from that trajectory and upload it using whatever means you have available (see Godel for the "upload RAPID program" approach).
PS: if you're in the US -- and I have a hunch you are -- you might want to get in touch with SwRI (Texas). Specifically Matt Robinson of the Manufacturing Robotics & Technologies Department. They have a lot of experience with the use of ROS in the type of applications I believe you are looking at.
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