An engineering-oriented method for the three dimensional workspace generation of robot manipulator

The generation and computation of the boundary shape and volume of robot manipulator is very important in the design stage, especially for three dimensional (3D) spacial manipulators. In the paper, an engineering-oriented approach based on numerical calculation and solid modeling software, is presented to create 3D robot workspace. Firstly, a numerical algorithm based on the Monte Carlo method is used to generate the 3D workspace consisting of points cloud. Secondly, the two-dimensional (2D) boundary points of each layer of the workspace are obtained by classifying these points into a series of slices. Finally, the shape and volume of robot workspace are generated based on 3D reconstruction in the commercial software SolidWorks, by importing the boundary points into the software and adopting some simple operations. Two examples are presented in the paper to illustrate the method. This method is feasible and practical for the generation and analysis of the workspace of robot manipulator. © 2011 Binary Information Press.