Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming - Second Edition

Understanding the MoveIt! IKFast plugin

One of the default numerical IK solvers in ROS is KDL. KDL is mainly using DOF > 6. In robots DOF <= 6, we can use analytic solvers, which is much faster than numerical solvers, such as KDL. Most of the industrial arms have DOF <= 6, so it will be good if we make an analytical solver plugin for each arm. The robot will work on the KDL solver too, but if we want a fast IK solution, we can choose something such as the IKFast module to generate analytical solver-based plugins for MoveIt!. We can check which are the IKFast plugin packages present in the robot (for example, universal robots and ABB):

• ur_kinematics: This package contains IKFast solver plugins of UR-5 and UR-10 robots from Universal Robotics ...