Visual/CLI/ROS tooling for testing IK plugins standalone

[thettasch-samxl]

When trying out new IK solver plugins, it is often quite difficult to debug issues, since we need to run the whole tesseract planning pipeline with the new plugin. It would be nice to have some sort of testing setup to do the following:

• Load a tesseract IK plugin (using the entries from the kinematics.yaml file)
• Expose some way to send the IK an arbitrary pose and then receive all the joint state solutions (possibly a ROS2 service or similar)
• Visualise the requested pose and various joint state solutions in RViz
• Compare different solutions from different solvers (potentially also how long they took to compute)

As far as I know, this functionality is not exposed anywhere (correct me if I'm wrong). Are there any intentions of implementing something like this, or potentially any interest in including something like this if it was developed out-of-house?

[gavanderhoorn]

I remember @marip8 explaining how he uses the Tesseract RViz plugin for this.

It's not as fancy as you describe, and you'd still have to create an SRDF etc, but you wouldn't need to plan anything. The plugin should support setting arbitrary poses for (selected) manipulators, making at least a quick sanity check not too involved.

The rest of what you describe does sound like it could be interesting.

[thettasch-samxl]

I just checked the workbench in more detail (my first cursory look hadn't turned anything up) and indeed, most of this functionality is in fact available in the Tesseract Workbench plugin for RViz (see image below).

For anyone else wanting to try this, you need to set up the Workbench RViz plugin, go to the manipulation tab, press Reload to populate the dropdowns and then choose Cartesian mode. It shows the IK solution numerically in the joint subtab and in the visualisation window.

A couple notes about this approach:

• You need the whole setup to the point where tesseract workbench works. This is not trivial to set up/not documented afaik
• You can't (easily) change IK plugins to try different ones
• Only one solution is shown
• Failure to compute IK is not shown explicitly (it just keeps the last valid solution's joint states)
• No way to change the IK seed (I assume it uses the current joint state for that)
• Need to switch tabs a lot to change cartesian position -> look at joint states -> change cartesian position

Other than that, its actually a very nice tool. Switching between cartesian and joint modes is seamless and the working/tcp frame can be changed.