August 16, 2022

Announcing MoveIt Pro Developer Platform

by Dr. Dave Coleman
Announcing MoveIt Pro Developer Platform

Enabling engineers to more quickly build robot manipulation applications.

PickNik Robotics was founded on the notion that robotics software should be accessible and that the economic abundance enabled by robotics should be something that everyone can take part in. Over the past ten years our open source package MoveIt has pushed the limits of what organizations have been able to do with robotic arms. Today we are excited to announce the commercial availability of our MoveIt Pro Developer Platform and MoveIt Pro SDK. These new software products help robotics engineers to create, debug, and ship complex manipulation projects faster.

MoveIt Pro is our answer to the need of expanding the role of MoveIt for robotics development, and it contains many of PickNik’s best practices developed over the past 7 years. The Developer Platform is primarily a user interface for programming fault-tolerant and multi-step motion planning problems in a low-code environment and quickly iterating on these capabilities during hardware testing. The SDK leverages Behavior Trees and task planning to achieve new levels of autonomy.

We are excited about our partners and customers who are already using MoveIt Pro, including RE2 Robotics, NASA, and Formant.

The currently available features in MoveIt Pro include:

  • Behavior tree building and debugging
  • Integrated task and motion planning for complex multi-step manipulation needs
  • Ability to remotely develop and test robot behaviors on hardware
  • Planning optimizations to help robots plan smarter and faster
  • Introspection into generated trajectories and decision making
  • Remote arm jogging and operator in-the-loop recovery
  • A library of pre-made Behavior Trees for common MoveIt-based tasks including
    • Pick object
    • Open door, open cabinet, open drawer
    • Inspect surface
    • Push button
  • …more coming soon

PickNik continues to invest heavily in the MoveIt open source project across all our projects, with dedicated engineers providing feature addition, maintenance, and documentation. We believe these new products will better position PickNik and the MoveIt project to remain competitive in the next decade of robotics innovation.

For more information about how MoveIt Pro can accelerate your robotics development, please reach out to hello@picknik.ai for a free trial.