ompl_planning with no obstacles crashing

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Lorenzo,

Setting the use_collision_map parameter doesn't disable collision checking - our names are a bit hard to understand, but the collision map is a voxelized occupancy grid that comes from sensors, while the collision space is the underlying collision checking infrastructure. How exactly else have you gone about trying to disable collision checking? If ompl planning can't initialize an environment representation it can't do anything - it can't check whether goal constraints are met in certain states, check for joint limits, or do any of the things that actually let it plan. It is probably the case that something should happen instead of a crash - for instance, a message saying "Cannot instantiate environment representation. Exiting."

If you think that the planning environment is successfully initializing and you want to disable collision checking for particular planning queries, that's easy to do. But starting ompl without a valid planning environment description isn't something the code is designed to do. If you can attach the output of ompl_planning as it's starting up I can maybe help more.

We're in the process of a major redesign with a primary design goal making it easier to get everything working on other robots, and there will eventually be a set of tutorials and tools that will make this easier.

-Gil