MoveIt! path planning superfluous about abb HOT 3 CLOSED

@Gengoz, MoveIt! and ROS are useful for avoiding collisions with objects in the environment and with the robot itself (including the tool). If you are just performing simple robot motion, with no need for collision avoidance, then ROS may not be the right tool. If you still want to control the robot externally, you can use the ROS interface and simply send a trajectory with the current joint position and the desired joint position. You can use the IK service provided by MoveIt! if you need to translate a Cartesian pose into a joint pose.

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Is the path provided by MoveIt! in most cases superfluous [..]

I'd say most cases entirely depends on which cases you are considering :). From a traditional automation perspective you could say that, but that would be ignoring the actual usefulness of sensor-based motion planning, which is something that I'd say is at the core of ROS and one of the reasons that ROS-Industrial exists.

Depending on your perspective, you may think of the IRC5 performing 'just' the interpolation between two consecutive trajectory points. Obviously at some level it is actually planning (as it needs to determine how to get from where it is to where you want it to go), but I personally reserve the term planning for something that has more situational awareness (which is I think is what @shaun-edwards was referring to), such as MoveIt.

Example: the IRC5 will happily plan a path between two points on two opposite sides of a wall, without taking into account it cannot physically execute that motion. Only what is typically called a 'higher level' planner which has access to a world model would figure out it needs to insert additional points to get the manipulator safely from one side to the other.

If you just want to get your TCP from point A to point B and know a priori that is always possible (or don't care about possible collisions), then you obviously have no need for any contextual or sensor-based planning, and can just send those points to the controller directly.

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That cleared things up. Thank you both very much!

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