Explore our comprehensive tutorials on key concepts in industrial robotics. These in-depth guides were meticulously crafted by Professor Ilian Bonev, co-founder of Mecademic, to cater to a diverse audience ranging from graduate students to field technicians. While the tutorials frequently reference Mecademic robots, the concepts covered apply universally to any industrial robot.
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How to use quaternions in industrial robotics
The concept of quaternions is fascinating in various applications, but in robotics, we care about quaternions mainly as a very efficient parameterization of 3D orientation, primarily that of the robot end-effector. Even though, in industrial robotics, Euler angles are the standard choice for representing orientation in space, there are situations when users must know how to use quaternions.
There are dozens of in-depth presentations on quaternions, but none is meant for industrial robot users. To fill the void, we present in this tutorial the strict minimum about quaternions that users of industrial robots should be familiar with. We discuss Euler's rotation theorem, slerp interpolation, and orientation errors, and present the basic formulas for dealing with quaternions.
What is the workspace of a six‑axis industrial robot arm?
If you intend to use a six-axis robot arm, you are most probably interested in positioning and orienting the robot’s end-effector in various locations poses. Therefore, you’ll certainly want to know the set of pose that you can reach with a specific end-effector. You’ll probably ask for a diagram showing the robot's working volume, working envelope, or working range.
And, unfortunately, you’ll often be presented with a simplistic schematic like the image on the left, or worse yet, with the so-called reach of the robot. In this tutorial, we describe the workspace of a six-axis robot arm, a set of several 6D entities. We discuss singularities, configurations and ways to optimize your robot's workspace.
If you intend to use a six-axis robot arm, you will probably need to do more than just position and orient the robot end-effector in various poses. You will likely also need the end-effector to follow prescribed paths, such as when gluing or inserting a pin. If this is the case, then you must learn about robot singularities because these special configurations will often impede the Cartesian movements of your robot end-effector.
You must, therefore, know how to avoid robot singularities or confront them by properly designing your robot cell and robot paths. In this tutorial, we present everything you need to know about the singularities of a six-axis robot arm.
How is orientation in space represented with Euler angles?
If you use a six-axis robot arm, you are probably interested in positioning its end-effector in various orientations. In other words, you need to be able to program your robot to move its end-effector both to a desired position AND a desired orientation (i.e., to a desired pose). Of course, you can always jog your robot’s end-effector to approximately the desired pose, but this so-called online programming method is tedious and imprecise. It is much more efficient to calculate and define your desired pose offline.
In industrial robotics, the most common method for describing orientation in space is Euler angles. This tutorial presents everything you need to know about Euler angles and their use in industrial robots.
