MoveIt helps robots physically interact with the world. This requires good models from a perception pipeline, robust grasping and other manipulation strategies, as well as efficient motion planning algorithms. MoveIt is built on top of the Robot Operating System (ROS), which enables different robotic software components to easily communicate with each other. MoveIt contains implementations of a wide variety of algorithms for planning, grasping, and control that can be applied to a broad range of robotic hardware. A setup assistant makes it easy to configure any new robot for use with MoveIt.

ROS and MoveIt are widely used in research and education. For example, it allows motion planning researchers to easily test algorithms on a robot, while using algorithms from perception researchers almost like a black box (and vice versa). Both ROS and MoveIt have also matured to a point that both are being widely used in industry as well.