From OSRF
Descartes is a path planning library that's designed to solve the problem of planning with semi-constrained trajectories. Semi-constrained means that the degrees of freedom of the path you need to plan are fewer than the degrees of freedom that your robot has. In other words, when planning a path, there are one or more "free" axes that your robot has to work with that can be moved any which way without disrupting the path. This can open up the planning space if you can utilize them creatively, which traditional robots (especially in the industrial space) usually can't. This results in reduced workspaces and (most dangerous of all) increased reliance on human intuition during the planning process.
Descartes was designed to generate common sense plans, exhibiting similar characteristics to paths planned by a human. It can solve easy problems quickly, and difficult problems eventually, integrating hybrid trajectories and dynamic replanning. It's easy to use, with a GUI that allows you to quickly set anchor points that the robot replans around, with visual confirmation of the new path. The second half of Shaun's ROSCon talk is an in-depth explanation of Descartes' interfaces and implementations intended for path planning fans (you know who you are).
As with many (if not most) of the projects being presented at ROSCon, Descartes is open source, and all of the development is public. If you'd like to try it out, the current stable release runs on ROS Hydro, and a tutorial is available on the ROS Wiki to help you get started.
Next up: Amit Moran & Gila Kamhi (Intel) Check out last week's post: Phobos -- Robot Model Development on Steroids
