Announcing MoveIt! Tutorials Codesprint with Franka Emika & PickNik
We are excited to announce that the robotic arm manufacturer Franka Emika is partnering with PickNik to sponsor a MoveIt! codesprint to further improve MoveIt!’s tutorials, documentation, and website.
Although MoveIt! is a widely used motion planning framework and ROS package, its documentation needs a bit of updating. The website and tutorials consistently get minor improvements and contributions from the dedicated community, but a much larger holistic effort is needed in improving the overall information flow and ensuring that all major concepts in MoveIt! are included.
Many MoveIt! users have noticed that the tutorials have not been migrated fully from previous ROS versions. In addition, our current example robot is the now retired PR2 robot. While once a revolutionary robot, the PR2 is not officially supported in latest ROS releases, is no longer manufactured, and is very expensive.
There are several key objectives we want to achieve:
- Migrate all the tutorial screenshots, configuration files, and launch files to a well supported robot
- Clean up the content and organization of the tutorials to help new users learn MoveIt! faster
- Revamp the aesthetic appearance of the MoveIt! website
We would like to thank Franka Emika for agreeing to sponsor this code sprint and their newest sensitive robotic arm - Panda - becoming the new flagship robot in the MoveIt! tutorials. You can find more information about open-source libraries and existing ROS integration of Panda at https://frankaemika.github.io.
