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Calculating/Visualizing a Manipulator's Reach Envelope/Workspace

I'm interested in developing a custom manipulator, and I wanted to do some iterative studies on link lengths and joint limits by seeing what the resulting reach envelope/workspace is.

Are there any tools in ROS that can help create something like this?

I came across this video of a robot in VREP doing something very similar to what I'm interested in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOPJyDKMWrQ

Asked by atomoclast on 2017-03-20 14:52:47 UTC

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Answers

Great question. Something like that is definitely missing in MoveIt and I don't know of a separate ROS module for that.

I know Shaun Edwards gave a presentation at ROSCon two years ago where he complained about missing tools for this... (https://vimeo.com/142622435)

The video you reference looks nice. Do you know whether the code for the visualization is Open Source? The setup in the video is pretty easy and I could imagine things get more complicated when you try to visualize the workspace of a 7-dof arm with rotational joints.

Asked by v4hn on 2017-03-21 06:23:48 UTC

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It's not too polished at the moment, but the reuleaux project can do something like that for you.

Asked by gvdhoorn on 2017-03-21 16:12:23 UTC

Yeah, I'm looking into Reuleaux!

Just need to do some stuff to get it to play nicely with Kinetic.

Asked by atomoclast on 2017-03-23 09:55:26 UTC

OpenRave can do this I believe. Here is an example: http://openrave.org/docs/latest_stable/openravepy/databases.kinematicreachability/

Asked by Airuno2L on 2017-03-23 07:25:28 UTC

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I'm looking into OpenRAVE. It does seem really fantastic, and I actually was able to run a study on my current design, but my issue is...you just get a 3D model with a cloud. How do I compute workspace dimensions and so on with it? There's also no information as to how the color coding is setup?

Asked by atomoclast on 2017-03-23 09:56:37 UTC