Collision checking in robot arm using MoveIt!

Along with motion planning and IK solving algorithm, one of the important tasks that is done in parallel in MoveIt! is collision checking and its avoidance. The collision can be self collision or environmental collision. MoveIt! can handle both the environment collision and the self collision. The MoveIt! package is inbuilt with FCL (Flexible Collision Library) (http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/FCL/fcl_docs/webpage/generated/index.html), which is an open source project that implements various collision detection and avoidance algorithms. MoveIt! takes the power of FCL and handles collision inside planning scene using a collision_detection::CollisionWorld class. The MoveIt! collision checking includes objects such as meshes, primitives shapes such as boxes and cylinders, and OctoMap. The OctoMap (http://octomap.github.io/) library implements a 3D occupancy grid called octree that consists of probabilistic information of obstacles in the environment. The...