Using Moveit! to actually control a robot
Hey Guys,
First of if the authors of Moveit! gets a chance to read this post, I just want to say thanks and congratulate them on a great piece of software which opens up lots of opportunities as researchers to work with a robot easily and effectively.
I am currently running Moveit! 0.4 alpha with ROS Groovy on Ubuntu 12.04. We had a new robot from Meka Robotics that I am trying to get Moveit! to work on. I followed the first two quick start tutorials on the Moveit!: setup assistant and rviz plugin. Both of them worked without any problems and I am able to "plan" and see the animation of either the arms, base, zlift (specific to the meka) move. However, when I came to the gazebo part, I could not get it work, primarily because as of now there is no gazebo model for the meka robot and also gazebo just would not start for some reason. I have decided to bypass the gazebo part for now and go directly to controlling the robot. Even for this I'm guessing I would need to setup the controllers.yaml and a controller_manager.launch for my robot. I was hoping I could get some help on that.
If I understand Moveit! correctly, the way it works is it plans and publishes the "plan" to some topics and I would have to write some code to subscribe to that and get it to the controllers for the robot. Please let me know if my understanding is incorrect. Is there instructions or tutorials or even examples of working code that shows how to do the entire pipeline: plan, publish to robot, execute by the robot etc and how we can customize this to our own robot? If someone can point me to the correct direction I would be very grateful.
Thanks for your time.