A CAD Representation of Robot Manipulator Workspace

If robot programming is to advance to the stage where the well-studied problems of automated path-planning, collision detection, workspace mapping et cetera can leave the research laboratory and take their place in industry, then there is a need for a new kind of robot programming. Incorporating robot pro- gramming into a CAD system is one possibility, and the first stage in producing such a system would be to repre- sent robot workspaces in a CAD-amenable format. This paper describes a representation of robot manipulator workspaces in terms of non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS), a standard representation for free form shapes in CAD. Applications of the technique to collision detection, path planning and workspace visualization problems are outlined. The paper concludes by providing signposts towards a new model of mechanism programming which is grounded in CAD concepts.