The architecture of MoveIt! is depicted in the following diagram taken from the concepts sections of its official documentation at http://moveit.ros.org/documentation/concepts/. Here, we describe the main concepts in brief. In order to install MoveIt!, you only have to run this command:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-hydro-moveit-full

Alternatively, you can install all the dependencies of the code that comes with this chapter by running the following command from a workspace that contains it:

$ rosdep install --from-paths src -iy

The following diagram (Figure 1) shows the architecture of MoveIt!:

Figure 1: MoveIt! architecture diagram

In the center of the architecture, we have the move_group element. The main idea is that we have to define groups of joints and other elements to perform moving actions using motion planning algorithms. These algorithms consider a scene with objects to interact with and the joints characteristics of the group.

A group is defined using standard...