Check for free space
Is there a shortcut for checking for free space at a given position?
My current approach would be to add a CollisionObject (eg cylinder), wait till it is published, check if there are collisions, remove the object again. The idea is however to do this as a quick precheck before doing path planning for a grasp and it shouldn't take too long (and shouldn't update any collision data structures)
running moveit and ros indigo on Kubuntu 14.04
Im actually looking into this as well, have you been able to get any meaningful results? Im thinking of a simple precheck using an octomap and checking if a space is "occupied".
Well, I haven't found some ready to run API, but I think you should be able to take a PlanningScene, add a placeholder object, check for collisions using the planning scene api and remove it. So compared to the approach in my question you save sending everything to MoveGroup and don't risk race cond