Amazing montage video including NEXTAGE OPEN celebrates MoveIt! 5-year

From TORK's blog:

MoveIt!, de-facto standard motion planning library for ROS, now celebrates 5th year since its initial release by an amazing compilation of application videos.
This is the 2nd time MoveIt! maintenance team makes such a montage.

Comparing with the one from 4 years ago back in 2013 soon after the software was just released, we can see many more Pick&Place applications this time.
Also captured my personal interest was that there are some mobile base/subsea rover manipulation apps, which is one of the future improvement items of MoveIt! (see this page “Mobile base integration”). It’d be absolutely a great contribution if the developers of those apps would give back their development to the upstream MoveIt! software.

As has always been, NEXTAGE Open, a dual-arm robot that TORK has been actively contributing to its maintenance and providing support service, appears in the video as well thanks to a Spanish system integrator Tecnalia presumably for their work with Airbus.

Hironx in motion from MoveIt! 5-year montage by courtesy of Tecnalia

TORK has been a motivated, skillful supporter of ROS and MoveIt! since our launch in 2013. If you’re wondering how you could employ MoveIt! to your robot, please consider our hands-on workshop series too.

P.S. List of all application’s developers are also available as follows:

(0:06) Delft Robotics and TU Delft Robotics Institute
(0:09) Techman Robot Inc.
(0:13) Correll Lab, CU Boulder
(0:37) Nuclear & Applied Robotics Group, Unv Texas
(0:50) Beta Robots
(0:55) GIRONA UNDERWATER VISION AND ROBOTICS
(1:03) Team VIGIR
(1:34) Honeybee Robotics
(1:49) ROBOTIS
(1:58) TECNALIA
(2:05) Correll Lab, CU Boulder
(2:26) TODO Driving under green blocks
(2:38) ROBOTIS
(2:54) Fetch Robotics
(3:05) Hochschule Ravensburg-Weingarten
(3:12) TU Darmstadt and Taurob GmbH – Team ARGONAUTS
(3:20) isys vision
(3:27) Technical Aspects of Multimodal System Group / Hamburg University
(3:33) Clearpath Robotics
(3:43) Shadow Robot

Updated MoveIt! Now Comes with Trajectory Introspection

From TORK blog:

Through the package update earlier June 2017, MoveIt! now allows you to introspect planned trajectory pose by pose.
Using the newly added trajectory slider on RViz, you can visually evaluate the waypoints in a planned trajectory on MoveIt!. 

As you see on the slider on the left side, you can now introspect each waypoint in a planned trajectory on MoveIt! on NEXTAGE Open.

See MoveIt! tutorial for how to activate this feature.

2017 MoveIt! update pt.2; Stopping motion on NEXTAGE needs your help

From TORK blog:

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In the previous post we introduced one of the many new features that were added to MoveIt! with its first update in 2017. Next feature we want to mention is the “stop motion”, which we’ve received many questions from our NEXTAGE users about.

Other than situations where you need to stop robots to move for the safety reasons, there can be many cases you want to stop/cancel/halt your robot for your application. The standard way to achieve this in MoveIt! had been lacking, which is finally organized this time (lead by a student at GSoC project by the way).

It works well with Pepper robot on simulation. You see in the following Youtube video (link in case you don't see the video pasted) that the arm stops as soon as the “stop” button on RViz was clicked.

This nice feature, however, does not YET work with the NEXTAGE Open. Don’t worry much, there’s a work going on already and we confirmed a patch submitted from a community member solves the issue on simulation! We just need to test the patch on the real NEXTAGE Open robot, and this is where we need a help from the robot owners. If you think you can help us testing with your own robot, please contact TORK at info[a_t]opensource-robotics.tokyo.jp or joint the discussion at the ticket for this issue on Github so that we’ll communicate with you. Thank you for your understanding toward the opensource!

First MoveIt! Update in 2017. Using it on NEXTAGE pt.1

From TORK blog:

New version of MoveIt! binary 0.7.6 is just released for ROS Indigo, first time in 2017 (for sure!) and first release since June 2016. This version comes with some long-wanted features (along with bug fixes of course) that we’re trying out using NEXTAGE simulator.

1. Changing trajectory velocity and acceleration during runtime

Changing the speed of the trajectory during runtime has been one of FAQs from NEXTAGE users who use MoveIt!, let alone many MoveIt! users on the globe. Now through MoveIt! RViz plugin you can conveniently configure that on the fly on the spinboxes added.



To configure that programmatically, see this tutorial that explains chainging MotionPlanRequest topic would do the work.

TORK is actively contributing the development and maintenance of MoveIt!.

Easy Teaching Operation for NEXTAGE Open by MoveIt! Joystick

(From TORK blog)

One of good news about ROS community is that the maintenance of MoveIt! got revitalized where TORK is contributing to as well. In 2016 there has already been three binary update releases so far. No more building from source if you were forced to!
We’ve mentioned about MoveIt! a few times recently ([1]，[2]), so do we today again． With the version 0.7.2 (on ROS Indigo), you can operate robot arms by joystick via MoveIt!

Running the feature is as simple as joystick. On RViz on the host where the joystick is plugged, check “Planning” tab –> “AllowExternalExecution” (see the image below).
Then run a launch file, either the one in your XXXX_moveit_config package if there’s already the aforementioned launch file, or simply make a launch file with the following:

<!-- https://github.com/ros-planning/moveit_setup_assistant/pull/90 -->
<launch>
  <arg name="dev" default="/dev/input/js0" />

  <!-- Launch joy node -->
  <node pkg="joy" type="joy_node" name="joy">
    <param name="dev" value="$(arg dev)" /> <!-- Customize this to match the location your joystick is plugged in on-->
    <param name="deadzone" value="0.2" />
    <param name="autorepeat_rate" value="40" />
    <param name="coalesce_interval" value="0.025" />
  </node>

  <!-- Launch python interface -->
  <node pkg="moveit_ros_visualization" type="moveit_joy.py" output="screen" name="moveit_joy"/>
</launch>

For the detail follow the usage page.
To run on NEXTAGE Open, make sure MoveIt! is running then run a single command below (modify jsX)． You can also refer to wiki for joystick usage for NEXTAGE Open.

roslaunch nextage_moveit_config joystick_control.launch dev:=/dev/input/js1

(At the top window, the human operator plans the movement on RViz visualizer. Once the plan looks good then operator executes the plan so that the simulated robot in the bottom window conducts the movement. This is a screen capture so joystick isn't invisible, but yes, all the robot's movement is commanded from a Sony PS3 joystick.)