MoveIt Interface to a Custom Robot

[Olalekan Ogunmolu]

Hello everyone,

I have a custom robot which consists of a head lying in a supine position on a table; underneath the head is a soft-actuator meant to move the head as desired in response to a desired trajectory. To this end, I wrote a simple urdf that simulates a mannequine head on a table; my current robot description has a single controller at the base of the head that moves the head along the +z-axis. Ideally, I would like to have more than one degree of freedom controller for the head child link but urdf does not support parallel linkages as of now. I am implementing the associated moveit plugin to the robot (superchick). 

I wrote my own ros agent, adapted from the agent_ros example for the pr2 robot and I have to work in the task space of the robot rather than the joint space as you guys did for the PR2 agent.  but I am not exactly sure how to proceed with the interfacing of the position command topic to the robot pose trajectories. I noticed that in the PR2 example, what commands the robot to move is actually the /gps_position_command ros topic which is initiated in the  pid_pub.py  script. My question is how is the PositionCommand message being updated within the pid_pub.py file. Would be happy to read from you.

Sincerely,

Lekan