Hi ROS Community!
It’s been a while, but we’re excited to announce MoveIt Pro 9.0, the latest major release of PickNik’s manipulation developer platform built on ROS 2. MoveIt Pro includes comprehensive support for AI model training & execution, Behavior Trees, MuJoCo simulation, and all the classic capabilities you expect like motion planning, collision avoidance, inverse kinematics, and real-time control.
This release adds support for ROS 2 Jazzy LTS (while still supporting ROS Humble), along with significant improvements to teleoperation, motion planning, developer tooling, and robot application workflows. MoveIt Pro now includes new joint-space and Cartesian-space motion planners that outperform previous implementations, to improve cycle time, robustness, and industry-required reliability. See the full benchmarking comparison for details
MoveIt Pro is developed by the team behind MoveIt 2, and our goal is to make it easier for robotics teams to build and deploy real-world manipulation systems using ROS. Many organizations in manufacturing, aerospace, logistics, agriculture, industrial cleaning, and research use MoveIt Pro to accelerate development without needing to build large amounts of infrastructure from scratch.
What’s new
Improved real-time control and teleoperation with Joint Jog
MoveIt Pro now includes a new “Joint Jog” teleoperation mode for controlling robots directly from the web UI. This replaces the previous MoveIt Servo based teleoperation implementation and introduces continuous collision checking, configurable safety factors, and optional link padding for safer manual control during debugging or demonstrations.
Scan-and-plan workflows
New scan-and-plan capabilities allow robots to scan surfaces with a sensor and automatically generate tool paths for tasks like spraying, sanding, washing, or grinding. These workflows make it easier to build surface-processing applications.
New Python APIs for MoveIt Pro Core
New low-level Python APIs expose the core planners, solvers, and controllers directly, enabling developers to build custom applications outside of the Behavior Tree framework. These APIs provide fine-grained control over motion planning and kinematics, including advanced features like customizable nullspace optimization and path constraints.
Improved motion planning APIs
Several updates improve flexibility for motion generation, including: improved path inverse kinematics, orientation tracking as a nullspace cost, customizable nullspace behavior, tunable path deviation tolerances.
Developer productivity improvements
The MoveIt Pro UI and Behavior Tree tooling received a number of improvements to make debugging and application development faster, including a redesigned UI layout and improved editing workflows, Behavior Tree editor improvements such as search and node snapping, better debugging tools including TF visualization and alert history
Expanded Library of Reusable Manipulation Skills
MoveIt Pro also includes a large library of reusable robot capabilities implemented as thread-safe Behavior Tree nodes, allowing developers to compose complex manipulation applications from modular building blocks instead of writing large amounts of robotics infrastructure from scratch. See our Behaviors Hub to explore the 200+ available Behaviors.
Built for the ROS ecosystem
MoveIt Pro integrates with the broader ROS ecosystem, including standard ROS drivers and packages. PickNik has been deeply involved in the MoveIt project since its early development, and we continue investing heavily in open-source robotics such as developing many ROS drivers for major vendors.
Learn more
Full release notes:
https://docs.picknik.ai/release-notes/
We’d love feedback from the ROS community, and we’re excited to see what developers build with these new capabilities. Contact us to learn more.
