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Robot definition

In MPK, robots are defined as kinematic trees. A node in such a kinematic tree is a 'joint' structure, which typically defines a rotation around an axis or a translation along a vector. The transform can be parameterized but need not. A 'joint' node can optionally have an associated link model. For example, a kinematic chain of three translational and three rotational joints can be used to define a rigid free-flying object. In this case, only the last joint would have a 'link' model, in this case the free-flying object (for visualization and collision checking).

MPK offers two possibilities to define the kinematic tree of a robot:

Robot files (.rob)
This is the recommended approach for defining robot kinematics. Robots can be added and removed without recompiling any code. However, joints types are limited to prismatic and revolute. For more details, see [*].

Hard-coded robots (.H, .cpp)
This approach consists of defining the kinematics description in source code files. The advantage is that arbitrary kinematics and parameterizations can be defined. The disadvantage is that the some code needs to be recompiled whenever a new robot type is added. For more details, see [*].



Subsections
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Next: Robot definition files (.rob) Up: Creating new scenes and Previous: Scene definition
Mitul Saha 2003-03-10