Hi,

this is a bit of a best practise question I guess. We have recently started seeing customer request for using very imprecise robots like YuMi or even worse UR5. So we need to think about adding some safety paddings between our environment and the actual robot (and it would not hurt for proper industrial robots either ...) when doing path planning.

So our setup currently looks like this: we have a static part consisting of the actual robot but also the robot cell (table, walls, etc) described by URDF (via xacro) and a dynamic part for stuff that is likely to move (boxes, obstacles, ...) and which gets created using PlanningScene::processCollisionObjectMsg().

Now we would like to add a safety margin around let's say "link4" of the actual robot and both the table (urdf) and boxes (CollisionObjects). However according to https://github.com/ros-planning/moveit_core/pull/168 paddings can only be set between the robot and collision objects. As we describe static stuff like the table using urdf this is a self collision and CollisionRobotUnpadded is used for collision checking.

So my actuall question now ;) : Is there a way to add a padding for this robot <-> table case? Are we missing something? Should we define "semi-static" objects like the table in a different way? Or should I try to come up with a furter padding category for collisions between links of the current group and links that are not part of it?

Thanks a lot Simon