Different Ways to Implement Custom Planners with MoveIt!

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Hello, I'm in the same process as you I believe; I'm trying to add a custom planner to MoveIt. I decided to use the first approach. Here are the two reasons I believe it is better to do so:

• OMPL already provide you with low-level building blocks. Things like data structures, operators to work on them and also all the already existing planners. For example, you can think about the representation of state-space and the tools (operators) that are associated with it. What I'm trying to say is that if you use OMPL, you won't have to worry about / program all of these things, and you can directly program your planner.
• There already is a plugin between MoveIt and OMPL. This seems obvious, but it means you don't have to spend (a lot of) time actually writing a new plugin (see blow), just code the planner.

As for you point n°2, I don't think there is any tutorial. But you can study the source code of the OMPL/MoveIt interface (located in ../src/moveit/moveit_planners/ompl/ompl_interface) and from there, create your own plugin for your planning library. I actually attempted to do so for the KrisLibrary, but I'm not good enough to do it. I believe even for an experienced programmer, this would take quite a long time.

As for point n°3, I am not aware of any other methods.

Hope this helps you.

Best, Maxens.