Question regarding the collision avoidance capabilities

[bgd29]

I trying to achieve collision free cartesian paths in a "semi cluttered" environment, and I'm trying to figure out whether Descartes is the tool for the job, or maybe if you guys have a different recommendation. Does Descartes plan around obstacles (like STOMP, OMPL etc) ? I believe an alternative for my application would be to detect the possible collisions and stitch in collision free paths generated by STOMP with the Descartes generated path.

[avwhite]

I am quite new to this myself. What I have gathered from using ROS and Descartes so far is that Descartes will plan around collisions between objects defined in the urdf file. These are just my own observations from using Descartes.

It seems like the planning scene of moveit can also supports more advanced descriptions of the environment, for when stuff is moving around over time or when the environment is being detected by sensors. I am not quite sure about the details of how this works, but Descartes will not take this into account currently as far as i understand. It seems that some people are working on adding this sort of capability here: #230 but apparently there are some problems.

That being said. If you have a static scene described in your urdf, Descartes will take this into consideration and find paths where the robot does not collide with the environment if there are any.