MoveIt 1 Source Build: Linux

Installing MoveIt from source is the first step in contributing new features, optimizations, and bug fixes back to the open source project. Thanks for getting involved!

MoveIt is mainly supported on Linux, and the following build instructions support in particular:

• Ubuntu 20.04 / ROS Noetic
• Ubuntu 18.04 / ROS Melodic
• Ubuntu 16.04 / ROS Kinetic (no longer officially supported)

We would like to expand our source build instructions to more operating systems, please contribute!

Prerequisites

Install

Follow all the instructions to install ROS. Please make sure you have followed all steps and have the latest versions of packages installed:

Source installation requires wstool, catkin_tools:

Kinetic/Melodic Note: for Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04, replace 'python3' with just 'python'

Create Workspace and Source

Optionally create a new workspace, you can name it whatever:

Next, source your ROS workspace to load the necessary environment variables, depending on what version of ROS you installed.

Choose one of the three:

This will load the ${ROS_DISTRO} variable, needed for the next step.

Download Source Code

By default, we will assume you are building the latest branch on Ubuntu 20.04: master. This branch builds for ROS Kinetic and newer, e.g. on Ubuntu 16.04 and newer. If you would like to build an older release of MoveIt from source, see the section below.

Pull down required repositories and build from within the root directory of your catkin workspace:

Optional: Excluding Packages from a Build

MoveIt is a large project and the default compile time can easily take around 30 minutes. If you would like to reduce your compile time or only need to build a subset of all the packages, catkin allows you to configure only a subset of packages to include in a build. Be careful not to disable packages that are needed by others (ie: are a dependency of other packages). You can exclude packages from a build in several ways:

• catkin-tools --blacklist (recommended)
• touch /path/to/package/directory/CATKIN_IGNORE
• rm -rf /path/to/package/directory

Here we show some examples using catkin_tools. Note: If you have already built these packages in your workspace you will need to use catkin clean first.

Disable All High-Level User Interfaces (optional)

catkin config --blacklist \
    moveit_commander \
    moveit_setup_assistant \
    moveit_ros_robot_interaction \
    moveit_ros_visualization \
    moveit_ros_benchmarks \
    moveit_controller_manager_example \
    moveit_ros_warehouse \
    moveit_ros_manipulation \
    moveit_visual_tools \
    rviz_visual_tools

Disable CHOMP Motion Planner (optional)

Note, every command to catkin config --blacklist will override the previous list by default. Using the option --append-args you can augment the existing blacklist.

catkin config --blacklist \
    moveit_chomp_optimizer_adapter \
    moveit_planners_chomp \
    chomp_motion_planner

Optional: Install a Compiler Cache

Building all or even just some of MoveIt from source can take up to an hour. A compiler cache can reduce this time to a few minutes by preventing unchanged files from being recompiled. The most prominent compiler cache is ccache suitable for gcc and other similar compilers.

Installation

On a Debian or Ubuntu system, installing ccache is simple:

sudo apt install ccache

For other OS, consult the package manager or software store and search for ccache. Refer to the ccache website for more information on downloading and installation.

Setup

To use ccache it must be explicitly configured - just installing the package is not enough. To automatically use ccache with all supported compilers prepend the /usr/lib/ccache directory to your PATH (for systems other than Debian or Ubuntu this directory may vary). It is easy to enable ccache on startup in bash. For other shells or systems adapt the commands appropriately.

To use caching for specific projects only, set the CC and CXX environment variables to a compiler proxy listed in /usr/lib/ccache before invoking make, cmake, catkin_make or catkin build.

Using ccache

If setup, ccache is used automatically.

To view the statistics on hit ratios and cache usage use the command below.

ccache --show-stats

Note: ccache can only cache compiler output if the compiler is actually triggered. If a catkin workspace has already been built, enabling ccache and rebuilding the workspace will not result in any caching. To seed ccache, clean out the *build* and *devel* spaces of the workspace and start from scratch. This can be done by either removing them manually (rm -rf build devel) or with catkin_tools (catkin clean -y).

Build MoveIt

catkin build

Source the Catkin Workspace

Setup your environment - you can do this every time you work with this particular source install of the code, or you can add this to your .bashrc (recommended):

source ~/ws_moveit/devel/setup.bash # or .zsh, depending on your shell

Quick Start

Start planning in Rviz with:

Advanced

Building Older Releases Of MoveIt

It's best to contribute to our latest branch, even if you're still on an earlier version of Ubuntu. However our latest branch does not support older versions of ROS such as ROS Indigo. Use the following command to build older releases from source:

Build Dependencies From Source

For MongoDB, OMPL, or FCL source installs, see Building Common MoveIt Dependencies from Source in Catkin.