RM4D: A Combined Reachability and Inverse Reachability Map for Common 6-/7-Axis Robot Arms by Dimensionality Reduction to 4D

Martin Rudorfer*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Published conference outputConference publication

Abstract

Knowledge of a manipulator's workspace is fundamental for a variety of tasks including robot design, grasp planning and robot base placement. Consequently, workspace representations are well studied in robotics. Two important representations are reachability maps and inverse reachability maps. The former predicts whether a given end-effector pose is reachable from where the robot currently is, and the latter suggests suitable base positions for a desired end-effector pose. Typically, the reachability map is built by discretizing the 6D space containing the robot's workspace and determining, for each cell, whether it is reachable or not. The reachability map is subsequently inverted to build the inverse map. This is a cumbersome process which restricts the applications of such maps. In this work, we exploit commonalities of existing six and seven axis robot arms to reduce the dimension of the discretization from 6D to 4D. We propose Reachability Map 4D (RM4D), a map that only requires a single 4D data structure for both forward and inverse queries. This gives a much more compact map that can be constructed by an order of magnitude faster than existing maps, with no inversion overheads and no loss in accuracy. Finally, we showcase the efficiency gains by applying RM4D for finding suitable base positions in a scenario with 800 target grasps.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
EditorsChristian Ott, Henny Admoni, Sven Behnke, Stjepan Bogdan, Aude Bolopion, Youngjin Choi, Fanny Ficuciello, Nicholas Gans, Clement Gosselin, Kensuke Harada, Erdal Kayacan, H. Jin Kim, Stefan Leutenegger, Zhe Liu, Perla Maiolino, Lino Marques, Takamitsu Matsubara, Anastasia Mavromatti, Mark Minor, Jason O'Kane, Hae Won Park, Hae-Won Park, Ioannis Rekleitis, Federico Renda, Elisa Ricci, Laurel D. Riek, Lorenzo Sabattini, Shaojie Shen, Yu Sun, Pierre-Brice Wieber, Katsu Yamane, Jingjin Yu
Place of PublicationAtlanta
PublisherIEEE
Pages7689-7695
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9798331541392
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2 Sept 2025
Event2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2025 - Atlanta, United States
Duration: 19 May 202523 May 2025

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
ISSN (Print)1050-4729

Conference

Conference2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2025
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAtlanta
Period19/05/2523/05/25

Bibliographical note

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