[ros-users] arm motion planning stacks release

[Sachin Chitta]

Willow Garage is happy to announce the release of our first set of
research stacks for arm motion planning.  These stacks include a
high-level arm_navigation stack, as well as general-purpose stacks
called motion_planners, motion_planning_common,
motion_planning_environment, motion_planning_visualization,
kinematics, collision_environment, and trajectory_filters. There are
also several PR2-specific stacks.

These stacks are an effort to develop a navigation stack for the arms
analogous to the navigation stack for mobile bases. They contain a
wide range of components that can be used for collision detection,
trajectory filtering, motion planning for robot manipulators, and
specific implementations of kinematics for the PR2 robot.

Significant contributions were made to this set of stacks by our
collaborators and interns over the past two years:

 * Ioan Sucan (from Lydia Kavraki's lab at Rice) developed the initial
version of this framework while an intern at Willow Garage over the
summer of 2008 and 2009 and has continued to contribute significantly
since. His contributions include the OMPL planning library that
contains a variety of probabilistic planners including ones developed
by Lydia Kavraki's lab over the years.
 * Maxim Likhachev's group at Penn (including Ben Cohen who was a
summer intern at Willow Garage in 2009) contributed the SBPL planning
library that incorporates the latest techniques in search based motion
planning.
 * Mrinal Kalakrishnan from USC developed the CHOMP motion planning
library while he was an intern at Willow Garage in 2009. This library
is based on the work of Nathan Ratliff, Matthew Zucker, J. Andrew
Bagnell and Siddhartha Srinivasa.

Additional contributions also came from Radu Rusu, Matei Ciocarlei and
Kaijen Hsiao (from Willow Garage) and Rosen Diankov (from CMU).

These stacks are currently classified as research stacks, which means
that the APIs are currently unstable and expected to change. We expect
the core libraries to reach maturity fairly quickly and be released as
stable software stacks, while other stacks will continue to
incorporate the latest in motion planning research from the world-wide
robotics community. We encourage the community to try them out to
provide feedback and contribute. A good starting point (including
installation instructions) is the arm_navigation wiki page :

http://www.ros.org/wiki/arm_navigation

A growing list of tutorials is available at
http://www.ros.org/wiki/arm_navigation/Tutorials

Blog posts on our website of demos that used some of these stacks give
you a better idea of potential applications:

1. JSK demo (kinematics stacks) -
http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2010/03/08/jsk-returns-willow-garage-tidiness-ensues
2. Robot replugged (kinematics stacks) -
http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2010/02/22/robot-replugged
3. Ben Cohen's summer work (SBPL) -
http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2009/10/07/motion-planning-doors-and-manipulation
4. Hierarchical planning (OMPL, move_arm) -
http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2009/09/21/hierarchical-planning-pr2
5. CHOMP Motion planner -
http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2009/09/02/chomp-motion-planner
6. OMPL - http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2009/08/26/collision-detecting-and-arm-planning
7. Towers of Hanoi (move_arm) -
http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2009/10/28/robots-students
8. Tabletop objects  (move_arm) -
http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2009/09/11/detecting-tabletop-objects

The individual stack and package wiki pages have descriptions of their
current status. We have undergone a ROS API review for most packages,
but the C++ APIs have not yet been reviewed. We encourage you to use
the ROS API -- we will make our best effort to keep this API stable.
The C++ APIs are being actively worked on (see the Roadmap on each
wiki page for more details) and we expect to be able to stabilize a
few of them in the next release cycle.

Please feel free to point out bugs, make feature requests, and tell us
how we can do better. We particularly encourage developers of motion
planners to look at integrating their motion planners into this
effort. We have made an attempt to modularize the architecture of this
system so that components developed by the community can be easily
plugged in. We also encourage researchers who may use these stacks on
other robots to get back to us with feedback about their experience.

Best Regards,
Your friendly neighborhood arm navigation development team

Sachin Chitta, Gil Jones (Willow Garage)
Ioan Sucan (Rice University)
Ben Cohen (University of Pennsylvania)
Mrinal Kalakrishnan (USC)

-- 
Sachin Chitta
Research Scientist
Willow Garage