Robowflex: Robot Motion Planning with MoveIt Made Easy

TL;DR

Robowflex is a user-friendly software library that simplifies robot motion planning with MoveIt and ROS, enabling easier development, evaluation, and integration of motion planning algorithms in robotics applications.

Contribution

It introduces an augmented high-level API for MoveIt, making motion planning more accessible and flexible for developers and researchers.

Findings

Simplifies motion planning setup and execution.

Supports development and evaluation of new motion planners.

Provides visualization and integration with other robotics libraries.

Abstract

Robowflex is a software library for robot motion planning in industrial and research applications, leveraging the popular MoveIt library and Robot Operating System (ROS) middleware. Robowflex provides an augmented API for crafting and manipulating motion planning queries within a single program, making motion planning with MoveIt easy. Robowflex's high-level API simplifies many common use-cases while still providing low-level access to the MoveIt library when needed. Robowflex is particularly useful for 1) developing new motion planners, 2) evaluating motion planners, and 3) complex problems that use motion planning as a subroutine (e.g., task and motion planning). Robowflex also provides visualization capabilities, integrations to other robotics libraries (e.g., DART and Tesseract), and is complementary to other robotics packages. With our library, the user does not need to be an expert at ROS or MoveIt to set up motion planning queries, extract information from results, and directly interface with a variety of software components. We demonstrate its efficacy through several example use-cases.