MoveIt 2 Tutorials

NOTE: This repository is a new fork from the MoveIt 1 tutorials and needs your help with porting old tutorials to ROS 2. To claim a tutorial to support the port of, see the Issues list. Thanks!

See the live MoveIt 2 tutorials here

This is the primary documentation for the MoveIt project. We strongly encourage you to help improve MoveIt's documentation. Please consider reading the guidelines below for writing the best documentation and tutorials. However, if you are uncomfortable with any of the approaches, simply adding documentation text to your pull requests is better than nothing.

These tutorials use the reStructuredText format commonly used in the Sphinx "Python Documentation Generator". This unfortunately differs from the common Markdown format, but its advantage is that it supports embedding code directly from source files for inline code tutorials.

All content in this repository is open source and released under the BSD License v3. Each individual source code file should contain a copy of the license.

This repository is currently built automatically by Github Actions:

• main: (Galactic, Rolling)
• main: (Galactic, Rolling)
• foxy: (Foxy)
• foxy: (Foxy)
• foxy: (Foxy)
• foxy: Github Pages: (Foxy)

Helping with Porting Tutorials to ROS 2

An issue has been created for each tutorial to be ported to Foxy. At the top of each tutorial there is a tag: ":moveit1:", remove the tag after the tutorial has been successfully updated.

Below are some links to help with the ports.

• colcon
• ament
• rclcpp

Versions

• main latest, changes should target this branch

MoveIt 2 Tutorials Source Build

Follow the MoveIt 2 Source Build instructions to setup a colcon workspace with moveit2 from source.

Cd into your moveit2 colcon workspace:

cd $COLCON_WS/src

Download Moveit2_tutorials Source Code

git clone https://github.com/ros-planning/moveit2_tutorials.git
vcs import < moveit2_tutorials/moveit2_tutorials.repos
rosdep install -r --from-paths . --ignore-src --rosdistro rolling -y

Configure and build the workspace:

cd $COLCON_WS
colcon build --event-handlers desktop_notification- status- --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

Build HTML Pages Locally

If you want to test the tutorials by generating the html pages locally on your machine, you can use the build_locally script by issuing the following commands in the root of the moveit2_tutorials package:

export ROS_DISTRO=rolling  # 20.04

cd $COLCON_WS/src/moveit2_tutorials
source /opt/ros/$ROS_DISTRO/setup.bash
./build_locally.sh

The local website <LOCAL_PACKAGE_PATH>/build/html/index.html should automatically open in your web browser.

Contributing

We rely on the community to keep these tutorials up to date and bug free. If you find an issue with the tutorials please open an issue on GitHub or open a PR with proposed changes.

Formatting and Style

Code Formatting

• These tutorials use the same style guidelines as the MoveIt project. When modifying or adding to these tutorials, it is required that code is auto formatted using clang-format. To check and apply our style guidelines we use pre-commit.
• Tutorials should exemplify best coding practices. If a contribution wouldn't pass review in the MoveIt project, then it shouldn't pass review in the tutorials.
• Relevant code should be included and explained using the .. tutorial-formatter:: tag.
• Irrelevant code should be excluded from the generated html using the BEGIN_TUTORIAL, END_TUTORIAL, BEGIN_SUB_TUTORIAL, and END_SUB_TUTORIAL tags.
• Whenever possible, links should be created using the extlinks dictionary defined in conf.py.
• All demo code should be runnable from within the moveit2_tutorials package.
• Python code should be run using ros2 run.

Style

• Each tutorial should be focused on teaching the user one feature or interface within MoveIt.
• Tutorials should flow from show to tell with videos and demos at the beginning followed by explanations.
• New tutorials should match the formatting, style and flow of existing tutorials whenever possible.

pre-commit

pre-commit is a tool that is used in moveit2_tutorials to check and apply style guidelines automatically. To install pre-commit into your system:

pip3 install pre-commit

Then under moveit2_tutorials directory install the git hooks like this:

cd $COLCON_WS/src/moveit2_tutorials && pre-commit install

With this pre-commit will automatically run and check a list of styling including clang-format, end of files and trailing whitespaces whenever you run git commit. To run pre-commit any time other than git commit:

cd $COLCON_WS/src/moveit2_tutorials && pre-commit run -a

Directory Structure

• Each tutorial should live in its own subdirectory within the ./doc/ <> directory.
• Add your tutorial to index.rst in the root directory.
• Tutorials should use the following directory structure omitting unnecessary files and subdirectories:

moveit2_tutorials/doc/
└── <tutorial_name>/
    ├── <tutorial_name>_tutorial.rst
    ├── CMakeLists.txt
    ├── package.xml
    ├── setup.py
    ├── images/
    │   └── <tutorial_name>_<image_description>.png
    ├── include/
    │   └── <tutorial_name>/
    │       └── <include_header>.h                      # Any custom C++ library header files
    ├── launch/
    │   └── <tutorial_name>_tutorial.launch.py
    ├── src/
    │   ├── <tutorial_name>_tutorial.cpp                # Main C++ executable
    │   ├── <include_source>.cpp                        # Custom C++ library source files
    │   └── <tutorial_name>/
    │       ├── __init__.py
    │       ├── <tutorial_name>_tutorial.py             # Main Python executable
    │       └── <python_library>.py                     # Custom Python libraries
    └── test/                                           # Ideally tutorials have their own integration tests
        ├── <tutorial_name>_tutorial.test.py            # Launch file for tests
        ├── <tutorial_name>_tutorial_test.py            # Python tests for tutorial
        └── <tutorial_name>_tutorial_test.cpp           # C++ tests for tutorial

Including Images and Videos

Images

The standard way to include an image in reStructuredText is

.. image:: filename.png
   :width: 700px

This assumes that filename.png is in the same folder as the source .rst file. Images linked in this way will automatically be copied to the appropriate folder in the build.

External Documentation

Do not include animated gifs as the file format leads to very large files. Use a video format like webm and see the section on local video below.

YouTube and other External Video

You can embed video with raw html, like in this example from the Pick and Place Tutorial.

.. raw:: html

    <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 5%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; height: auto;">
        <iframe width="700px" height="400px" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QBJPxx_63Bs?rel=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
    </div>

This includes Youtube's suggested embed html.

Local Video

To embed a video that is included in this repository, you also will use raw html, like this example from the Quickstart in RViz tutorial.

.. raw:: html

    <video width="700px" controls="true" autoplay="true" loop="true">
        <source src="../../../_static/videos/rviz_joints_nullspace.webm" type="video/webm">
        The joints moving while the end effector stays still
    </video>

Note that the video file is in the _static/videos folder instead of the same folder.

External Documentation on <video> tag