MoveIt! provides a great flexibility to switch the inverse kinematics algorithms using the robot plugins. Users can write their own IK solver as a MoveIt! plugin and switch from the default solver plugin whenever required. The default IK solver in MoveIt! is a numerical jacobian-based solver.
Compared to the analytic solvers, the numerical solver can take time to solve IK. The package called IKFast can be used to generate a C++ code for solving IK using analytical methods, which can be used for different kinds of robot manipulator and perform better if the DOF is less than 6. This C++ code can also be converted into the MoveIt! plugin by using some ROS tool. We will look at this procedure in the upcoming chapters. ...
