Extending the motion planning framework—MoveIt with advanced manipulation functions for industrial applications

MoveIt is the primary software library for motion planning and mobile manipulation in ROS, and it incorporates the latest advances in motion planning, control and perception. However, it is still quite recent, and some important functions to build more advanced manipulation applications, required to robotize many manufacturing processes, have not been developed yet. MoveIt is an open source software, and it relies on the contributions from its community to keep improving and adding new features. Therefore, in this paper, its current state is analyzed to find out which are its main necessities and provide a solution to them. In particular, three gaps of MoveIt are addressed: the automatic tool changing at runtime, the generation of trajectories with full control over the end effector path and speed, and the generation of dual-arm trajectories using different synchronization policies. These functions have been tested with a Motoman SDA10F dual-arm robot, demonstrating their validity in different scenarios. All the developed solutions are generic and robot-agnostic, and they are openly available to be used to extend the capabilities of MoveIt.