Performing motion planning using control programs

In the previous section, we learned that we can plan and execute trajectories for our robot using the MoveIt RViz environment. But, this is not the most common case.

Usually, we would want to move our robot with our control program, and this is exactly what we are going to do in this chapter! For this course, we are going to use Python to control the robot, because it's easier and faster.

First of all, we will have to create a MoveIt package for the fetch robot, just like we learned to do in the previous section.

Getting ready

We can create a MoveIt package for the simulated robot, just like we did in the previous section. We will have to add two planning groups to this package, one for the arm, and one for the end-effector.

Note

You will find the necessary URDF file in the chapter8_tutorials/src/model folder, and it is named fetch.urdf.

We can create as many poses as we want, but these two are the most important poses—start and home.

The following...