Workspace Determination of Kinematic Redundant Manipulators Using a Ray-Based Method

Abstract

Determining the workspace of a robotic manipulator is extremely significant for knowing its abilities and planning the robot application. There exist several techniques for the robot workspace determination. However, these methods usually are affected by computational redundancy, like in the case of Monte Carlo based methods, or their implementation is difficult. Moreover, the workspace analysis of kinematic redundant manipulators is even more complex. This paper introduces a ray-based workspace determination algorithm, easy to implement and not affected by computational redundancy. The proposed method can be applied to any type of serial robot, but it is tested only on spatial kinematic redundant robots. The results show how the approach can clearly determine the boundary of the robot workspace in a short period of time. Finally the time and quality performance of the ray-based method results are compared to the Monte Carlo one demonstrating the improvement of the proposed method.