Using Moveit to control 6 dof manipulator

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Strongly agree with the answer of gvdhoorn, too bad it was posted as a comment and not as the answer for the question.

Complementing his answer I would like to provide with a weblink of a 2 DOF arm that serves as a minimal example in simulation with gazebo about how to setup a manipulator with moveit see acrobat robot here.

So in steps:

1. Create URDF model, this tutorial helps if you don't have any URDF experience

2. Create controllers for each of your arm joints: e.g. position, velocity, effort, strongly recommend to use ros control for that

3. Create a joint trajectory controller (actionlib)

Notice so far no moveit has come into the picture yet. However your arm is ready to accept trajectory msgs (and therefore able to follow parameterized paths, which are called trajectories, that include "waypoints" with position, velocity and acceleration information for each point).

Moveit then is the "glue" or "integrator" between URDF, OMPL, FCL, robot state (compute FK from sensors, aka transform enconder data into TF data using the robot_state_publisher).

1. Run moveit setup assistant and generate a moveit config pkg

2. launch move_group.launch

3. Now how to use moveit to move the arm, well there are many ways, here I leave some ideas:

a) record arm configurations, save them in my_moveit_config_pkg/config/my_robot_name.srdf file and using moveit commander rosrun moveit_commander moveit_commander_cmdline.py , then use my_arm_group_name, then go my_arm_pose

b) use moveit api to create a client node that communicates with move_group "server" to move the arm in a similar way from point a, but from code instead of terminal, check some examples here

c) use rviz moveit plugin!, open rviz, select "add topic" button, then add a MotionPlanning topic type. It will open an Embedded window that you can use to move your robot with few button clicks

Hope it helps.