Workspace Analysis of Industrial Manipulators and its Effective Teaching in RoboAnalyzer

Serial manipulators have a workspace within which the manipulator can reach. While designing and developing a manipulator, it is important to check whether a pose (position and orientation) is attainable or not. Though there exist many methods on workspace analysis that are proposed by researchers, these have to be implemented by the users in the form of MATLAB program or equivalent. There is no free software, in the best knowledge of the authors, that can draw workspace for a wrist-partitioned serial manipulator. Through this paper, the authors present a new module on Workspace Analysis in RoboAnalyzer software. The module lets the user enter the Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) parameters of a serial manipulator and its workspace region is drawn and shown to the user. The authors have discovered that incremental joint motion gives better results than the Monte-Carlo random sampling of joint angles within allowed joint range, proposed by many researchers. The authors also propose a novel method to determine the boundary of the points in the workspace using a concept of radial frustum. Finally, the workspace regions of many industrial manipulators were drawn using the proposed module and verified to be correct. The authors feel the module would help in effective teaching and learning in a robotics related course and also help robotics designers to visualize the workspace and make any corrective changes in their design.