Contributor
Raghavender Sahdev

Adding more motion planning libraries to MoveIt


Mentors
Mark Moll
Organization
Open Source Robotics Foundation

MoveIt was designed to be highly plugin-based and originally supported 3 planning libraries. Today that number has shrunk to 1. There are many good alternative motion planning libraries that could be re-added to MoveIt, including: SBPL, STOMP, ITOMP, DRAKE. This project focuses on the addition of support for motion planning libraries in MoveIt planners. MoveIt only had a single stable motion planning library as its core motion planner, i.e. OMPL. As a part of this GSoC project, motion planning support was extended by making other motion planners (CHOMP) more stable and porting STOMP also to be a part of the MoveIt motion planners family. The MoveIt part of STOMP was ported from the ros-industrial/industrial_moveit repository into moveit/motion-planners. Furthermore, benchmarking package was made to work with other motion planners in addition to OMPL and tutorials for the same were added. Planning Request Adapters were extended to include motion planners like CHOMP, STOMP to be used as an additional step with OMPL or other motion planners to produce better trajectories in different situations. Tutorials for Planning request adapters will also be added in moveit_tutorials repository.