Using Multiple MoveGroup Instances

[rkeatin3]

I have written a small action server around MoveIt for controlling a robot system with 2 UR5s, their end-effectors, and some other hardware. The action server was intended to make using MoveIt from the command line easier and also to provide a common interface should I decide to try another motion planning framework.

This has all been working well, but now I want to control the UR5s asynchronously. Since this behavior is explicitly forbidden in the trajectory_execution_manager, I have separated the system into two MoveIt instances (discussion here) that I launch within separate namespaces. As a result I am having all kinds of trouble making the appropriate changes to my action server. Has anyone else tried something like this?

For instance, I had to change construction of my move groups to pass a full MoveGroup::Options structure rather than just the group name. That seemed to be necessary to get the constructor to look in the proper namespace. The next issue that has arisen is that a new CurrentStateMonitor gets constructed instead of the MoveGroups being connected to the existing CurrentStateMonitors created for each namespace. 

Any suggestions appreciated.

Thanks,

Ryan