Making our robot arm intelligent

As you may recall, we control the robot arm by publishing values to a rostopic, which we did in Chapter 3, Building an Industrial Mobile Manipulator. Later, as a result of the follow_joint_trajectory plugin, we made use of the action server implementation and wrote a client that could move the robot to the desired position. These implementations follow forward kinematics where, knowing the link lengths and limits, you give a rotation value for each and every joint. As a result, the arm reaches a certain pose in the environment. What if you knew the pose of an object in the environment and you wanted to move the robot arm to that pose? This is called inverse kinematics and this is what we aim to achieve in this section through a specialized software called Moveit. Let's look at the basics of Moveit.

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