MoveIt 2 Beta - Feature List

Next Generation ROS
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Big news! MoveIt 2 Beta is almost ready for release on our February 14th launch date, thanks to PickNik Robotics’ team, Yu Yan (Intel), and some of MoveIt’s maintainers.

With today’s API freeze we’re publishing the official feature list and provide some updates around the progress and Beta testing. The next two weeks until the release we’re still working on completing parameter and launch setup, as well as general debugging, cleanup and documentation.

Feature List

Over the last months we’ve been working very hard to migrate a major part of MoveIt to ROS 2. Listed below are all ported packages that will be available for the release (subitems indicate ported libraries in only partially ported packages):

  • moveit_core
  • moveit_ros_planning
  • moveit_planners_ompl
  • moveit_planning_interface
    • moveit_cpp
    • moveit_common_planning_interface_objects
  • moveit_kinematics
    • kdl_kinematics_plugin
    • lma_kinematics_plugin
    • srv_kinematics_plugin
  • moveit_ros_visualization
    • robot_state_rviz_plugin
    • planning_scene_rviz_plugin
    • rviz_plugin_render_tools
  • moveit_plugins
    • moveit_simple_controller_manager
  • occupancy_map_monitor

With the ported packages the feature list of MoveIt 2 Beta covers pretty much all core functionalities that MoveIt provides, such as motion planning, collision checking, trajectory execution, IK and visualization in RViz.

Unfortunately, there are still some packages that have not been ported yet due to lack of funding. The high-level interfaces MoveGroup and MoveGroupInterface won’t be ready for the release, just as the dependent MotionPlanningDisplay and MoveItSetupAssistant. You can find a complete list of the migration progress in this spreadsheet. Please contact PickNik if you are interested in funding or otherwise supporting the full migration of MoveIt to ROS 2.

Demo and Beta Testing

We will provide a MoveItCpp demo setup with example code that we welcome you to play around with and try to break as much as possible. As a Beta tester you are invited to reproduce the demo with other robot setups as well while documenting and filing any issues you find. Ideally, you would provide PR’s with according fixes as well ;). More information about how to participate in the Beta testing phase will be given with the release announcement. Let us know if you are interested in being a Beta tester.

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If MoveIt2 is more or less a straight port from MoveIt, what’s your plan for keeping them both in sync? I’m curious if you’re going to be moving any substantial development from ROS to ROS2 or if they might deviate over time.

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@smac That’s a point we are still discussing. For now we are performing periodic syncs with the MoveIt 1 master branch. With ongoing MoveIt 2 roadmap progress and larger refactoring efforts this will probably not be feasible anymore, so we will at some point end up with deviating code bases. We are still putting a lot of effort in to MoveIt 1 and the Noetic release is just around the corner, so I wouldn’t say we are moving “substantial development” away from ROS 1 very soon. However, we hope to see a growing interest and support for MoveIt 2 which would allow us to put more effort on the new features we’ve planned for the future.

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Great stuff seeing the beta release coming out. Well done pushing it out guys.