January 03, 2017

First MoveIt! release in 2017 into ROS Indigo

by 130s

We are happy to announce that a lot of improvements are now released into MoveIt! on ROS Indigo LTS (Long Term Support)! It’s been 6 months since the last release into Indigo back in June 2016.

During this time, MoveIt! maintenance has been refurbished and we now consolidated development repositories of many packages whose repos were previously separated. For ROS Jade and Kinetic MoveIt! has been already released from this single repo, and Indigo finally made a new release out from the same single repo.

Change to installation

You can install the binaries of all the basic libraries by a single line of command without specifying many packages:

$ apt-get install ros-indigo-moveit

NOTE that ros-indigo-moveit-full is temporarily gone. It’ll be back again upon the next public sync (cf. previous public sync announcement).

If you want to build MoveIt! from source instead of binaries, then simply clone the single repo:

$ cd %YOUR_CATKIN_WS%/src
$ git clone https://github.com/moveit/moveit.git   (http)
$ git clone git@github.com:moveit/moveit.git       (ssh)

For more info about installation, check the tutorial moveit.ros.org/install.

Things you should know

  • Rebuild your full (moveit-related) workspace or you might experience problems. There have been some (mostly internal) binary-incompatible changes for speedup and safety.

  • Make sure you have the new version of all relevant moveit packages. Because of reorganization of the development process and the package structure, you might find your system omitted some packages when installing updates in ubuntu. Updating them explicitly should work though.

  • The move_group node loads all core-plugins implicitly. If you notice unwanted services/actions, you can disable these explicitly in your move_group.launch. The change to our move_group.launch template illustrates the changed interface.

  • “Invalid Trajectory: start point deviates from current robot state more than …“ MoveIt 0.7.3+ ensures that the start state of the robot is near the current state before executing a trajectory. The check might be violated if the noise in your JointStates exceeds the default threshold value of 0.01 per joint even if your robot did not move between planning and execution. In this case you can increase the threshold value in the ros parameter /move_group/trajectory_execution/allowed_start_tolerance - or disable the check by setting it to 0.0

  • MoveIt 0.7.5+ provides libraries called libmoveit*.so.0.7.3. This version suffix is called an SONAME and (in MoveIt indigo) indicates the last version that broke binary compatibility.

Changelog

Among many changes added since the last Indigo release, some notable ones are listed as follows. Because the new feature development is mainly now happening for ROS Kinetic (as mentioned upon the latest Kinetic release), some changes are only available in newer ROS distros and thus unavailable in Indigo mainly due to the following reasons:

  • unmet dependency
  • ABI brekage (it is avoided as much as possible, desite exceptional cases)

The table below aims to better visualize the available changes recently introduced into MoveIt! among ROS distros.

Changes made Available in Indigo? Jade? Kinetic?
You can stop a trajectory while it’s being executed via RViz moveit_ros/#713. See also video o o o
Capability to execute trajectory with a ROS action #60, #94 o o o
Trajectory safety validation before execution #63, #225 o o o
New planners in OMPL are now available from MoveIt! (geometric::{FMT, BFMT, PDST, STRIDE, BiTRRT, LBTRRT, BiEST, ProjEST, LazyPRM, LazyPRMstar, SPARS, SPARStwo}) (see PR for detail #33) x x o
MoveGroup’s default capabilities are now added by default #35. o o o
New benchmarking using PlanningArena #22 x x o
Separate Pick request without Grasps from Grasp Planning request #32 x x o
Increase collision checking reliability for newly created moveit_config packages #33 x x o
IK solvers consolidated into a new moveit_kinematics package #24 o o o
Fedora support is added. Feedback (and fix if necessary) welcomed! o o o
[Fix] Unreasonable “Invalid Trajectory: start point deviates” error #283 o o o
update link transforms in UnionConstraintSampler::project too #38 o o o
Maximum acceleration scaling factor moveit_core/#273 o o o
Enables setting optimization objectives from ompl_planning.yaml moveit_planners/#75 o o o
ApplyPlanningSceneService capability moveit_ros/#686 o o o

–Your friendly MoveIt! maintenance team.