Quantitatively evaluate the reach capability

The ROS package is a tool that allows users to visualize and quantitatively evaluate the reach capability of a robot system for a given workpiece. It contains ROS-based plugins for kinematics, evaluation, and display interfaces. The package can be used to calculate a numerical “fitness” score of an inverse kinematics (IK) solution at a given Cartesian target pose, with higher values indicating better reachability. The package can also generate a point cloud of target points on the workpiece and create a configuration YAML file defining the parameters of the reach study and the configuration of the interface plugins. The package can be installed by cloning the repository into a catkin workspace and installing the dependencies. The ROS package can be used with ROS1 infrastructure and plugins, or with ROS2-based plugins.

I. How to use this ros package

The package can also generate a point cloud of target points on the workpiece and create a configuration YAML file defining the parameters of the reach study and the configuration of the interface plugins. The package contains ROS-based plugins for kinematics, evaluation, and display interfaces. The interfaces described above are exposed as plugins using the boost_plugin_loader library to support custom implementations.

To use this, follow these general steps:

1. Install the reach ros package
2. Prepare necessary files for your robot system, such as URDF, SRDF, kinematics file, joint limits file, etc.
3. Generate a mesh model of the workpiece if needed.
4. Create a point cloud of the target points on the workpiece using a command line tool like PCL 1.8:

   pcl_mesh_sampling <workpiece_mesh>.ply <output_cloud>.pcd -n_samples <number of samples> -leaf_size <leaf_size>
   

5. Create a configuration YAML file defining the parameters of the reach study and the configuration of the interface plugins.
6. Run the setup launch file and the reach study analysis.

II. Result of this ros package

This package is a tool that allows users to visualize and quantitatively evaluate the reach capability of a robot system for a given workpiece. The reach_ros and reach_ros2 repositories provide ROS-based plugins, capability demos, and general usage instructions for the reach package

References

1. GitHub