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confuse:What exactly is the MoveIt!?

asked 2013-05-23 13:03:36 -0500

Gazer gravatar image

updated 2013-05-24 04:43:48 -0500

Hi all

I am very confused now. I was going to write a rosnode to controlled my two wheels robot model in gazebo moving. I was told to check out the pr2_controller. Then I did some research, and I found the Moveit! project. I am very confused. What exactly is the Moveit! project? Does it write a rosnode and manage all those troublesome plugins for your robot?

What exactly does it do?

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answered 2013-05-23 17:16:01 -0500

MoveIt is largely a replacement for the Arm Navigation stack of packages. It is primarily intended to be used on serial manipulators, such as the PR2's arms or industrial robots.

It contains much of the same functionality:

  • forward and inverse kinematics
  • motion planning (with constraints)
  • collision avoidance
  • grasp planning

And adds a few new capabilities:

  • benchmarking
  • reachability / manipulability analysis
  • real-time collision monitoring and reaction

But, one of the main goals of MoveIt was to improve some of the architecture over the previous arm navigation design. MoveIt is designed primarily as a single node, where the various components interconnect via a set of plugin interfaces. This design can give noticeably faster performance in planning tasks, since it eliminates the communication overhead between the various nodes in the arm navigation stack. Another key design goal was to implement most of the core MoveIt functionality as a set of ROS-independent C++ libraries. This allows these components to be directly integrated in your application, if that architecture works better.

You can find out a lot more by exploring the MoveIt Wiki and asking questions on their user group. But, hopefully, this will give you a good overview. My personal opinion is that, if your robot is a simple 2-wheel mobile robot (like a Roomba, turtlebot, or Pioneer), then MoveIt's probably not the right interface for you.

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Thank you very much for your answer. They are extremely informative and useful, and I hope your answer could serve as a future reference for other ppl to see. In fact, my robot is just a simple 2-wheel mobile robot (segbot rmp), and I am learning how to move it, retrieve its current position

Gazer gravatar image Gazer  ( 2013-05-25 06:52:04 -0500 )edit

and/or retrieve camera, laser,etc, without the worries of navigation. would you mind to suggest some tutorial (like the pr2_controller, etc) for me to investigate on this issue? Thanks again! Sorry, forgot to mention that I am working on Gazebo with ROS

Gazer gravatar image Gazer  ( 2013-05-25 06:53:36 -0500 )edit

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Asked: 2013-05-23 13:03:36 -0500

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Last updated: May 23 '13