WSRender: A Workspace Analysis and Visualization Toolbox for Robotic Manipulator Design and Verification

Abstract

Workspace analysis is essential for robotic manipulators, which helps researchers study, evaluate, and optimize their designs based on specific criteria with due consideration of ergonomics and usability. Although workspace analysis is a common research topic, current solutions provide design-specific evaluation, and there is a lack of generic software tools for different hardware configurations. This letter presents WSRender, a versatile research-oriented framework for workspace analysis and visualization. It is based on the Orocos Kinematics and Dynamics Library and the Matlab Robotic Toolbox. The software architecture is presented using four use cases for demonstrating its practical use in single robot, dual-arm manipulator performance evaluation, multi-robot interaction analysis, and master–slave mapping. The source code of WSRender <xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn1" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">¹</xref> is made publicly available for the benefit of the research community for the design or evaluation of robotic manipulators.