MoveIt
Summary
In fall 2011 I joined Willow Garage, working in the Autonomous Mobile Manipulation Group. My main project while working at Willow Garage was MoveIt, a new tool intended to replace Arm Navigation. My contribution to this project was developing the architecture, designing and implementing most of its components.
MoveIt is a robot agnostic software framework that integrates motion planning, kinematics and collision detection with online processing of sensor data and monitored execution of trajectories. The functionality provided is centered around motion planning and relies on ROS for configuration and communication. Given 3D sensor data as input, MoveIt constructs and maintains a representation of the world around the robot and offers planning and manipulation capabilities. Various analysis and benchmarking tools are also included.
Citation
Ioan A. Șucan and Sachin Chitta, "MoveIt!", [Online] Available: http://moveit.ros.org
Logo
Ohloh Information
Check out MoveIt on ohloh.
Demo video for MoveIt
OMPL
Summary
OMPL (the Open Motion Planning Library) is a library of motion planners that is free to use (even for commercial purposes) and can be easily integrated with existing middleware. In 2012 OMPL won the Open Source Software World Grand Challenge. Currently OMPL is the core planning library of Arm Navigation and MoveIt and has become a standard tool for benchmarking planning algorithms.
Citation
Ioan A. Șucan, Mark Moll, Lydia E. Kavraki, The Open Motion Planning Library, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, December 2012.
Ohloh Information
Check out OMPL on ohloh.
Arm Navigation
Summary
During my internships at Willow Garage (summer 2008 and summer 2009) I initiated the packages that later became the Arm Navigation stack in ROS. The development of the Arm Navigation stack continued at Willow Garage with the help of many people, especially Sachin Chitta and E. Gil Jones.
Demo videos
A replanning demo with the PR2:
Motion planning in a complex environment:
An additional demo of the grasping pipeline implemented by my colleagues using Arm Navigation and OMPL:
MathWebSearch
MathWebSearch is a tool I started while at Jacobs University Bremen (2006). In short, MathWebSearch is a search engine for content with semantic meaning. Taking structured information such as Content MathML, an index is constructed such that information can be quickly queried. A specific language that allows specification of queries such as "show me expressions that have the property of commutativity" was also developed. Since 2006 the project has grown thanks to a number of students that have worked on this tool as part of the KWARC group, but at the time of my graduation, a functional search engine, web interface and web-crawling back-end with automatic index updating was functional.