MoveIt is planning to participate again in the Google Summer of Code. Below is a tentative list of project ideas. If you have your own project idea, feel free to create a pull request on the repository for this page. Unlike previous years, there are now two different project sizes. Medium projects are 175 hours, while large projects are 350 hours. See the Google Summer of Code FAQ for details.
Utilize the MoveIt Benchmark Suite developed during last year’s GSoC to prepare a set of realistic scenarios to benchmark independent components of the MoveIt eco-system. Based on these tests, we would like to setup a CI runner to evaluate the performance impact of new pull-requests in MoveIt. An advanced component in this might evaluate the benchmark results for statistically significant changes and point these out in a CI report.
Expected outcome: New pull requests are automatically checked for performance regressions or improvements.
Project size: large (350 hours)
Difficulty: medium
Preferred skills: C++, Python, MoveIt, Motion Planning, Benchmarking, and Building Infrastructure
MoveIt currently only supports the execution of one robot trajectory (although the trajectory can involve multiple planning groups, e.g. two arms). However, to run e.g. a robot workcell efficiently, each robot arm has to move independently.
The goal of this project is to allow multiple trajectories to be started, executed and stopped independently from one another. The main difficulty is that the arms may collide with one another, so additional checks will be necessary, such as:
Do two trajectories intersect at all?
Does the next position in a trajectory collide with another robot arm?
What are the next positions of the other currently active robot arms?
While there are some ROS Answers posts and examples floating around, there is no definitive resource on how to set up multiple manipulators with MoveIt (and especially MoveIt2). The goal of this project is to write a tutorial that should become the reference.
Expected outcome: A ROS beginner can read the tutorial and set up a ros2_control / MoveIt pipeline without additional help.
Project size: medium (175 hours)
Difficulty: easy
Preferred skills: Technical Writing, ROS, MoveIt, Python, and YAML
MoveIt contains many routines that mix actions that produce different results depending on when or how many times they are run and pure calculations where the output is always the same with the same inputs. Because of the mixing of types of code MoveIt is larger than it needs to be with a significant amount of redundant logic. Secondly, MoveIt is less robust than it could be because it is very difficult to test those routines and the test base fails to consider many of the side effects. For this project, the contributor will refactor calculations (pure functions) out of code that has side-affects (depends on when or how many times it is run) and will write tests for that code in isolation. This will make MoveIt more robust, easier to maintain, and easier to use. See this issue for more discussion. Doing this project will develop skills in functional programming, code refactoring, and software architecture.
Expected outcome: Core parts of MoveIt are refactored to use pure functions.
Project size: medium (175 hours)
Difficulty: hard
Preferred skills: C++, Functional Programming, and GTest
Bullet support is partially done, but more work is needed. A memory leak issue was identified that needs to be fixed. Support for continuous collision checking would be nice. Related pull requests include PR 2897 and PR 2838.
Project size: medium (175 hours)
Expected outcome: Continuous collision checking is supported and the memory leak is eliminated.
Difficulty: hard
Preferred skills: MoveIt, Collision Checking, and C++
