Choosing the right tools for motion planning

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Hi everyone,

I'm developping a pick and place application with an UR3 robot. I have a action server which send the Pose of the object to pick in my robot's base_link frame. Now I would like to make another node which does the following actions :

• Place gripper's tcp on an "pre-pick" position. Gripper's z-axis must be aligned with my object's z-axis (which can be tilted) and I want my tcp to be x centimeters away from the object.
• Perform the approach, close the gripper
• Move gripper's tcp to "post-pick" position, which is the same as pre-pick for now
• Move to a named position to place the object

I think it's a pretty common task, but I didn't find many information about the general workflow.

I already tried the "pick and place demo" from the MoveIt documentation (https://ros-planning.github.io/moveit...) which is really great and convenient but some features are missing (manual command of the gripper, grasp control, etc.).

So, I tried to use the movegroup interface but it doesn't look convenient for moving along an axis, for instance (or maybe I'm not using it the right way). Also, the paths from one pose to another doesn't always seems very "optimal".

While looking on the internet for solutions I've seen plenty of things I could use (descartes, cartesian path, STOMP, IKFast, ...) but I can't really figure out what plugins/methods I should use or not use in my application ...

I would be very gratefull if someone could give me some guidance about this !

Thank you.