Introducing MoveIt

One of the difficult problems in robotics is to define a path for the motion of a robot's arms to grasp an object, especially when obstacles may obstruct the most obvious path of motion. Fortunately, a ROS package called MoveIt allows us to plan and execute a complicated trajectory.

A video created at Rethink Robotics shows how to use MoveIt to plan the motion of Baxter's arms and then have MoveIt actually cause a real or simulated Baxter to execute the motion. To see the video, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=1Zdkwym42P4.

A tutorial is available at the Rethink wiki site at http://sdk.rethinkrobotics.com/wiki/MoveIt_Tutorial.

First, start the Baxter simulator in Gazebo:

$ cd baxter_ws
$ ./baxter.sh sim
$ roslaunch baxter_gazebo baxter_world.launch

In a second terminal window, untuck Baxter's arms and start the Python script that starts the joint_trajectory_action_server:

$ cd baxter_ws
$ ./baxter.sh sim
$ rosrun baxter_tools tuck_arms.py...