I have been asked if its possible to visulaise the space occipued by a robot as its moves through a programmed path. This function would be very useful when trying to discover possible collisions between robots working in close proximity to each other. What he was thinking was a bubble which surrounded the virtual robot and changed to identify the space the robot had occupied buring its path. This would greatly ease the difficulty and risk of programming robots where collisions can occur. Is something like this already catered for or can it be introduced into RS?
The idea was for a ‘bubble’ to be shown which showed the space occupied by the robot after the RAPID program had been executed. The ‘bubble’ would be updated as the RAPID program executed and would reveal where the robot including joints and tooling had been. The “Show Work Envelope” function only shows the reachabililty of the TCP and doesn’t show the potnetial collisions of the robot and tooling within two adjascent path programs. Todate I’ve not found anything that can map out collision zones and qualify them offline.
What your describing (sweep volume of polygonal models) is an extremely complex problem and really an area of research so I wouldn’t expect it to show up in RS anytime soon.
But since you want to use it for collision analysis, why not just use the collision detection functionality already present? Also, that takes into account where the robots are at every point in time, while your method creates a single volume for the entire program.
I wasn’t surprised by your response that this is a complex solution. Though I am surprised it?_Ts still an area of research that has not yet been fully exploited by other industries.
The collision detection functionality is a good idea, but would only reveal collisions that had been programmed into the path or perfectly timed between the two robots; an example would be the robot moving through a static object or two robots moving through each other at the same point in their routines. Adding external influences that cannot be simulated cause endless possibilities for the combination of positions between the two robots. This gives my collision detection function a more dynamic focus - how to detect a collision between two robots that could be anywhere within their routines. This collision function is designed for robotic equipment already built in order to identify/discover collisions the robots inherit by design that cannot be avoided or mitigated. My hope is that RS could create a single polygonal volume, one for each robot. This polygonal volume would represent every instance of space that the robots occupied during their program execution. If the volumes where to meet then you would have identified that the robots have the opportunity to collide. The programmer could then put a collision release technique into each robot which would prevent that collision occurring. RS could further compliment the programmers needs. Running the function again would confirm during that portion of the RAPID code the robots are safe, the sweep volume of polygonal model would then be removed for the next portion of the coding. In the end single polygonal volumes would be created that would identify the volumes occupied by the robot during corresponding collision portions of the code.
I understand that this complex solution might not find its way into RS, but with more robots being designed into ever tighter situations, a method to identify the opportunity for collisions would be a very powerful function for onsite programmers.
