Motion planning of a robot in RViz using the MoveIt! configuration package

MoveIt! provides an RViz plugin that allows developers to set the planning problem. From this plugin, the desired pose of the manipulator can be set, and a motion trajectory can be generated to test MoveIt! planning capabilities. To launch this plugin along with the robot model, we can directly use the MoveIt! launch files included in the MoveIt! configuration package. This package consists of configuration files and launch files to start motion planning in RViz. There is a demo launch file in the package to explore all the package's functionalities.

Here is the command to invoke the demo launch file:

roslaunch seven_dof_arm_config demo.launch  

If everything works fine, we will get the following screen of RViz being loaded with the MotionPlanning plugin provided by MoveIt!:

Figure 6.11 – MoveIt! RViz plugin

As you can see, from this plugin you can configure...