We are proud to announce that MoveIt is now available as a Debian download for the ROS 1.0 distribution Noetic Ninjemys. This long term support (LTS) version of MoveIt 1.0 will be supported until May 2025, although future development of MoveIt will now focus on MoveIt 2.0 (for ROS 2). Because this is the last distribution of ROS 1, we are not promising API stability for at least the next 6 months. Instead, we will continue to add new features and improvements to MoveIt Noetic as they are developed in the development branch.
What’s new in Noetic?
All the latest features of MoveIt that we have been developing over the last 2 years since the release of ROS Melodic are now available for Ubuntu 20.04, which includes full Python 3 support along with many other major features:
- Benchmarking tooling
- Servo (former JogArm) for real-time Jacobian control
- MoveItCpp for convenient access to low-level classes in MoveIt
- Bullet collision detection
- Allowing different controllers for execution
- Improvements to Trajectory Execution
- Unified collision environment (no more split between Robot and Environment)
- Named frames in CollisionObjects (
bottle/tip,screwdriver/handle, …) - Improved responsiveness of PlanningSceneDisplay Default velocity/acceleration scaling factors in Move Group (do not always execute with full-speed - unless requested)
- Improvements to RViz integration
- No more implicit SVD in Eigen::Transforms (use Eigen::Transform::linear() instead of rotation())
- Cleanup of MoveGroupInterface
What does it take to Migrate to Noetic?
Full migration notes are available here, but some important changes include:
- RobotModel no longer overrides empty URDF collision geometry
- Planned trajectories are now slow by default - you can set the default yourself.
- CollisionRobot and CollisionWorld are combined into a single CollisionEnv class.
- Extended the return value of MoveItCommander.MoveGroup.plan() Requests to get_planning_scene service without explicitly setting “components” now return full - scene
- moveit_ros_planning no longer depends on moveit_ros_perception RobotTrajectory provides a copy constructor that allows a shallow (default) and deep copy of - waypoints Replace the redundant namespaces robot_state:: and robot_model:: with the actual namespace - moveit::core::
Should I migrate to MoveIt Noetic or MoveIt 2 Foxy?
The MoveIt 2 Foxy release is already available, so to best future proof yourself we recommend “pulling off the bandaid” now and switching to MoveIt 2 Foxy. Especially if you are planning long-term and are aiming for running your robot application in a production environment at some point, it’s advisable to invest in running ROS 2 rather early than later. However, if you already have significant investment in ROS 1, you will find the migration to Noetic much easier as ROS 2 is a full rewrite of the middleware. Both releases require upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04, so using Noetic as a stepping stone to ROS 2 may also be a good idea as the latest version is synced with the Foxy branch to maintain feature-parity during the transition phase
Final Notes
Thank you to all the maintainers and contributors of MoveIt who made this release possible! We encourage you to get involved with the project by contributing code and bug fixes!