Creating a Workspace Envelope

This procedure explains how to create a workspace envelope around a robot.

This envelope defines a volume within which all the points are reachable with the selected tool profile. This is primarily used to find out a reachable position for the product. The envelope becomes a saved object on the tree and can be shown or hidden.

Before you begin:
  • To perform this procedure, you must have a robot with a defined inverse kinematic.
  1. Click Create Workspace Envelope .
  2. Select the robot for which you will create the envelope.
    The Workspace Envelope dialog box appears.
  3. Select the desired Tool Profile and Mesh Resolution from the lists provided. The available mesh resolutions are Coarse, Medium, or Fine.
  4. Click OK.
    The envelope appears around the robot and in the tree, as a Workspace under Analysis Objects.

The inner and outer reachable surfaces are created. The wrist joints are held at their current position while generating the surface. By default, the surfaces are created with the current Tool Profile in effect. It can be overridden by selecting another tool profile. The travel limits for the first three positioning joints in the kinematic chain are used to generate the limits of the surfaces. Forward kinematics solution is used to generate the envelope.

Workspace generation is limited to devices whose first three positioning joints fall into one of the eight generic type arm kinematics classes:

  • Cartesian
  • SCARA
  • Cylindrical
  • Block
  • Bore
  • Articulated
  • Spherical
  • Pendulum

The singularity positions are not considered for the envelope creation.