How to generate 3D surface or robot workspace?

Hi everyone, I could use some help with the workspace of my industrial robot. it has six rotary joints and two prismatic joints. In particular, I wanted to know where I should start for the realisation of the workspace. And is it better to use direct kinematics or inverse kinematics for its calculation? Thank you all in advance

Answer 1

[Aman]

Hi Francesco,

As per my understanding, you want to visualize the robot workspace in 3D and want to know whether direct kinematics is good for that or inverse kinematics will be good.

In order to visualize the workspace, you can leverage the below two functions readily available in the file exchange.

• https://in.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/131239-plot-2d-or-3d-robot-workspace?s_tid=srchtitle_support_results_1_robot%2520workspace
• https://in.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/71136-plotworkspace-plot-workspace-of-n-dof-planar-robot?s_tid=srchtitle_support_results_3_robot%2520workspace

Now, coming to your next query, choose between the two based on the use case that you have. The direct kinematics is more useful when the goal is to understand the end-effector's position given specific joint angles useful for mapping the robot's workspace, while the inverse kinematics is more preferred for planning movements to reach a desired end-effector position, crucial in task execution where the target position and orientation are known.

I hope this helps!