This FTP will add realtime support to MoveIt through a number of innovations including full migration to ROS 2. This will improve the minimum cycle time of industrial applications leveraging motion planning in ROS. Despite MoveIt’s usage in many industrial systems with powerful manipulators, MoveIt lacks appropriate realtime support. Faster and more deterministic planning times will enable closed-loop control and more reactive systems. This will support industrial use cases were process throughput is of utmost importance.
Roadmap and Progress
The realization of this FTP is structured in milestones which correspond to the official MoveIt 2 roadmap:
- Straight Port to ROS 2
- Realtime Support
- Fully Leverage ROS 2
Currently (May 2020), we are working on finalizing Milestone 1 – the progress can be reviewed at the Github Project Board which lists the remaining packages and issues that are still required for completion. This Milestone is completed once MoveIt 2 is feature-complete and released. The Moveit 2 release versions and dates can be found here.
The work on Milestone 2 “Realtime Support” is being investigated in parallel, together with required features aimed for in Milestone 3 “Fully Leverage ROS 2”. Once active development has started, expected timeline and project boards will be published here and on the Github repo.