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Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

Identification of regions in space that a robotic manipulator can reach in a given amount of time is important for many applications, such as safety monitoring of industrial manipulators and trajectory and task planning. However, due to the high-dimensional configuration space of many robots, reasoning about possible physical motion is often intractable. In this paper, we propose a novel method for creating a reachability grid, a voxel-based representation that estimates the minimum time needed for a manipulator to reach any physical location within its workspace. We use up to second-degree constraints on joint motion to model motion limits for each joint independently, followed by successive voxel approximations to map these limits on to the robot's physical workspace. Results using a simulated manipulator indicate that our method can produce accurate reachability grids in real-time, even for robots with many degrees of freedom. Furthermore, errors are almost exclusively biased towards producing more optimistic reachability estimates, which is a desirable characteristic for many applications.

Notes

Sponsor: Office of Naval Research

Associated Project(s): Intelligent Monitoring of Assembly Operations

Text Reference

Peter Anderson-Sprecher and Reid Simmons, "Voxel-Based Motion Bounding and Workspace Estimation for Robotic Manipulators ," International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May, 2012.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Anderson-Sprecher_2012_7008,
   author = "Peter Anderson-Sprecher and Reid Simmons",
   title = "Voxel-Based Motion Bounding and Workspace Estimation for Robotic Manipulators ",
   booktitle = "International Conference on Robotics and Automation",
   month = "May",
   year = "2012",
}

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