The Planning Scene

In MoveIt and MoveIt Pro, the planning scene is the source of truth for the environment in which your robotic agents do motion planning. The planning scene contains all the information used to represent the robot and its physical environment. Overall, it includes a representation of the robot's state, the physical environment around the robot, and sensor data that can modify the planning scene, such as point clouds or occupancy maps. It can be modified using behaviors (e.g. the AddVirtualObjectToPlanningScene behavior) in MoveIt Pro, or directly in C++ (e.g. applyPlanningScene), or via ROS2 service calls. The planning scene monitor is a wrapper over the planning scene itself that allows for thread-safe concurrent modification of the planning scene.

See here to read more about the planning scene and planning scene monitor.