Understanding MoveIt! IKFast plugin

One of the default numerical IK solvers in ROS is KDL. KDL is mainly using DOF > 6. In robots DOF <= 6, we can use analytic solvers, which is much faster than numerical solvers such as KDL. Most of the industrial arms are having DOF <= 6, so it will be good if we make an analytical solver plugin for each arm.

The robot will work on the KDL solver too, but if we want fast IK solution, we can choose something such as the IKFast module to generate analytical solver-based plugins for MoveIt!. We can check which all are the IKFast plugin packages present in the robot, for example, universal robots and ABB.

• ur_kinematics: This package contains IKFast solver plugins of UR-5 and UR-10 robots from universal robotics

• abb_irb2400_moveit_plugins/irb2400_kinematics: This package contains IKFast solver plugins for the ABB robot model IRB 2400

We can go through the procedures to build an IKFast plugin for MoveIt!. It will be useful when we create an IK solver...