Setting up SBPL (arm_planning) for MoveIt! with Setup Assistant

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I don't know that you're able to configure this from within the Setup Assistant, but you should be able to modify the launch files to change the planning pipeline. I haven't tried this myself, but it looks like you should be able to edit the move_group.launch in your moveit package:

<include ns="move_group" file="$(find my_robot_moveit_pkg)/launch/planning_pipeline.launch">
  <arg name="pipeline" value="ompl" />
</include>

If you change "ompl" to "sbpl" in move_group.launch, it will try to load sbpl_planning_pipline.launch instead of ompl_planning_pipline.launch. My guess is that this should switch to using SBPL instead of OMPL and things should "just work". But I haven't tried it yet, so good luck!

Edit:
It sounds like you may not have sbpl installed. I don't know that there is a binary ubuntu package for SBPL/MoveIt yet, so you may need to download and install from source.

You can read here for how plugins are integrated with ROS. In summary, the package needs a few things to make the plugin work: an export tag in the manifest.xml (or package.xml) file tells the ROS build system to look for a _plugins.xml file which provides details on what classes and library files to look in for the actual plugin code.

It may help to use rospack to get a list of what plugins are currently found in your ROS installation:

rospack plugins --attrib=plugin moveit_core

If this list doesn't include a plugin for SBPL, then you won't be able to get it to work with the rest of MoveIt, no matter what you put in the launch files.

Edit 2:
To use a package from source, you just need to place the package directory (with its source files, include files, manifest.xml, etc.) somewhere in your $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH. Typically, you set up a workspace directory under your home directory to use for ROS development. If this sounds confusing, you may need to revisit some of the early tutorials.

You can use rospack find sbpl_interface_ros to see if ROS can find your package okay. Once that works, you can do rosmake sbpl_interface_ros to build the package. If this fails, it may be because you're also missing one of the dependencies for this package. Use rospack depends sbpl_interface_ros to get a list of all package dependencies. You'll need to install all these, either using binary packages or from source. You can try using rosdep install sbpl_interface_ros, but this may not work for some packages.

Edit 3:
You should read the FAQ to see how to install missing dependencies. In short:

1) Go to the ROS Wiki and search for the package (upper right).

2) On the package's wiki page, see what stack the package is a part of. In the case of planning_models, this is the arm_navigation package.

3) Try to install the binary package:

sudo apt-get install ros-<distro>-<stack>
sudo apt-get install ros-groovy-arm-navigation

4) If that doesn't work, you ... (more)