MoveIt Servo (realtime arm servoing)

MoveIt 2's realtime servoing module: it takes a continuous stream of velocity or pose commands and drives the arm safely.

MoveIt Servo is the realtime servoing module built into MoveIt 2 (ROS package moveit_servo, formerly known as Jog Arm). Regular MoveIt takes a goal, plans a full trajectory, and then executes it; Servo instead consumes a steady stream of small commands and works out the next joint positions or velocities every cycle, usually handing them to a ros2_control controller. The official docs list three input types — individual joint velocities, an end-effector velocity, and a target end-effector pose (the Humble docs cover only the first two) — and they can come from a gamepad, a 3D mouse, or closed-loop software such as a visual servoing controller. Servo converts end-effector commands into joint commands with an inverse Jacobian or an IK plugin, slows down (and stops if necessary) as the arm nears a singularity or an obstacle, and enforces joint position and velocity limits. The catch: commands need fresh timestamps and must keep arriving — stale ones are ignored and the arm comes to a stop.

ExampleRun the official Panda gamepad demo: joystick readings become end-effector velocity commands streamed to Servo, and the arm follows in real time; steer it toward the table collision objects in the scene and it slows down, then stops.

Also called

moveit_servo, Jog Arm

Related

MoveIt Motion Planning Framework · Visual Servoing · Teleoperation · Singular Configuration (Kinematic Singularity) · Collision Checking · ros2_control

Sources

Realtime Servo（MoveIt 2 文档） (Chinese)
Realtime Arm Servoing（MoveIt 2 Humble 文档） (Chinese)
Introducing MoveIt Servo in ROS 2（MoveIt 博客） (Chinese)

As of

2026-10