Fmstudio is an experimental testbed that integrates the A-SBL planner (or, alternatively, the SBL planner if compiled without the ADAPT_COLLCHECKER option) and a simple path smoother with a plain but powerful user interface. To keep the code small and portable, we did not provide fancy buttons or menus. Instead, most commands are simply given by pressing specific keys on the keyboard.
However, fmstudio contains some convenient methods for setting up and storing configurations and for planning tasks. In particular, the user can modify the configuration by clicking on robot links and then changing their parameters with the keyboard. Other options include a Cartesian interface and a target point selection method, both based on incremental inverse kinematics computation.
After start-up, fmstudio opens a graphics window that shows the loaded scene file (one of the files with '.iv' extension in the scenes/ subdirectory). Furthermore, it dumps status information and a simple menu with all possible commands in the shell window from which it was started. Two lists of configurations are maintained by the program: 'Database config' and 'Plan config'. By default, the former is read upon start-up from a database file with the same base name as the given scene file but extension '.conf'. The latter list ('Plan config') can then be filled by the user to define a planning task (consisting of two or more key configurations). Planning tasks and fully planned paths can be edited and saved.
In the following 'mpk home directory' will refer to the directory into which mpk was installed (for version 1.0, this is mpk_v1.0/).