Can a MoveIt goal include velocity (and even acceleration)?

edit

I was wondering whether MoveIt allowed starting and goal poses to include velocity and acceleration constraints in addition to the position itself?

No, this is not supported right now.

MoveIt is primarily a kinematics oriented planning framework. So dynamics are added after the fact (ie: time, velocity and acceleration), and is not taken into account in the planning of the motion itself.

I believe this is mainly due to the fact that when MoveIt was designed/first implemented, OMPL also only supported kinematics, which, as it is/was MoveIt's default planning library, caused MoveIt to focus on that as well.

Additional note/thought: your description starts to hint at something which almost sounds like a controller, instead of a planner. The distinction is sometimes difficult to make, especially when shorter time budgets/quantas/horizons get used, but MoveIt has traditionally been used more as a "global planner": low(ish)-frequency, longer time-scale planning. Execution is then delegated to "lower-level" components, which are typically either drivers directly or an intermediary such as ros_control.

There are plans to change this though, where MoveIt (probably moveit2) gets a structure similar to the global+local planners which are common in nav stacks, and which would make "real-time" use of MoveIt more feasible. Servo is a first step towards that I believe.

See the roadmap for more information.