Dear ROS Users,

OpenRAVE's ikfast feature has been seeing a lot of attention from
ros-users recently, so we hope that making this announcement on
ros-users will help get a picture of what's going on with ROS and
OpenRAVE:

We're pleased to announce the first public testing server of
analytical inverse kinematics files produced by ikfast:

http://www.openrave.org/testing/job/openrave/

The tests are run nightly and tagged with the current openrave and
ikfast versions. These results are then updated on the openrave
webpage here:

http://openrave.programmingvision.com/en/main/robots.html

The testing procedures are very thorough and are explained in detail here:

http://openrave.programmingvision.com/en/main/ikfast/index.html

Navigating the "robots" openrave page, you'll be able to see
statistics for all possible permutations of IK and download the
produced C++ files. For example the PR2 page has 70 different ik
solvers:

file:///home/rdiankov/ros/cturtle/jsk-ros-pkg/openrave_planning/openrave/openrave_svn/docs/build/en/main/ikfast/pr2-beta-static.html#robot-pr2-beta-static

For each result, the "C++ Code" link gives the code and the "View"
link goes directly to the testing server page where the full testing
results are shown. If the IK failed to generate or gave a wrong
solution, the results will show a stack trace and the inputs that gave
the wrong solution.

For example, when generating 6D IK for the PR2 leftarm and setting the
l_shoulder_lift_joint as a free parameter, 0.1% of the time a wrong
solution will be given:

http://www.openrave.org/testing/job/openrave/lastSuccessfulBuild/testReport/%28root%29/pr2-beta-static__leftarm/_Transform6D_free__l_shoulder_lift_joint_16___/?

By clicking on the "wrong solution rate" link, a history of the value
will be shown that is tagged with the openrave revision:

http://openrave.org/testing/job/openrave/48/testReport/junit/%28root%29/pr2-beta-static__leftarm/_Transform6D_free__l_shoulder_lift_joint_16___/measurementPlots/wrong%20solutions/history/

In any case all these results are autogenerated from these robot repositories:

http://openrave.programmingvision.com/en/main/robots_overview.html#repositories

They are stored in the international standard COLLADA file format:

http://www.khronos.org/collada/

and OpenRAVE offers several robot-specific extensions to make the
robots "planning-ready":

http://openrave.programmingvision.com/wiki/index.php/Format:COLLADA

The collada_urdf package in the robot_model trunk should convert the
URDF files into COLLADA files that use these extensions.

Our hope is that eventually the database will contain all of the
world's robot arms. So, if you have any robot models that you want
included on this page please send an email to the openrave-users list!

In order to keep the openrave code and documentation more tightly
synchronized, we have unified all the OpenRAVE documentation resources
into one auto-generated  (from sources) homepage:

http://www.openrave.org

Some of the cool things to note are the examples/databases/interfaces gallery:

http://openrave.programmingvision.com/en/main/examples.html

http://openrave.programmingvision.com/en/main/databases.html

http://openrave.programmingvision.com/en/main/plugin_interfaces.html

Finally, just to assure everyone we're working on tighter integration
with ROS and have begun to offer some of the standard
planning/manipulation services through the orrosplanning package.

rosen diankov,