How is the end effector in MoveIt! suppposed to be used?

Question

In the MoveIt! Setup Assistant 2.0, there is a tag "End Effectors", which content translates to the <end_effector> tags of the robot.srdf file.

What is this good for and how was it meant to be used? Given you have one simple robotic manipulator similar to the one on the picture bellow.

Say I want the possition of the link marked as 'end effector' to be controlled by the MoveIt! planner. So I tell the MoveIt! "Move the manipulator in such a way, that this link ends up at coordinates [0.2, 0.1, 1.0]." and it plans the trajectories of the whole arm to satisfy this instruction. How should I set the end effector element and planning groups?

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Originally posted by kump on ROS Answers with karma: 308 on 2019-04-25

Post score: 0

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Original comments

Comment by ddl_hust on 2019-04-25:
you can set the whole arm as a group and the last link without parent as end_effector

Answer 1

So, apparently the end effector is supposed to be a part of a planning group. It is used by methods for planning trajectories given the goal pose. The MoveIt! will compute the trajectories of all the joint in the planning group to move this link (end effector) to the specified pose.

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Originally posted by kump with karma: 308 on 2019-05-02

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 0