Interating with Rviz Moveit! plugin through Python script

[Łukasz Duda]

Hello,

I would like to ask what would be the best way to interface with Rviz plugin through python scripts.
What I want to do currently is to issue the 'plan' command without actually clicking the button in the user interface.

I was thinking of two solutions:
- Utilize the current start and end pose set in Rviz to create a moveit motion plan in my own python moveit node. However I see no published ros topics that would give me those states.
- Send a 'plan' command through a ros service to Rviz moveit plugin, but I don't think these are available.

Could anyone tell me how should I approach this problem? Any help is appreciated.

[Sam Pfeiffer]

Hello,

If you just want to see the plan being performed (without execution) in Rviz you have an example of code in python that does that here:

http://docs.ros.org/api/pr2_moveit_tutorials/html/planning/scripts/doc/move_group_python_interface_tutorial.html#planning-to-a-pose-goal

Also, when you ask for a planning in my experience you can see it reproduced in Rviz also, using the movegroup commander or directly sending goals to the move_group action server.

Good luck!

[Łukasz Duda]

Thank you for your answer!

I learned the api some more, looked through the tutorial code and now I can describe more precisely what I need.

I would like to access the pose of the start and end state in Rviz.
 What I can do is access the pose of the interactive markers, but that only tells me about the position of the end effector - I would like to know the state of all joints in the goal state(the joint constraints).
I can get see them after listening to /move_group/goal but only after the 'plan' button is pressed and they are send to the /move_group/goal. I would like to obtain this state earlier, ideally with every motion of the interactive matker.