This package allows you to visualize the workspace of your robot easily considering collision detection and joint limits. The calculation will be done using the moveit framwork. So the only thing you need is a moveit_config of your robot.
You need to install moveit and its visual tools:
sudo apt install ros-noetic-moveit ros-noetic-moveit-visual-tools
Before launching the simple-reachability nodes launch the demo.launch file from your moveit configuration to provide a planning interface and open up RVIZ.
roslaunch my_robot_moveit_config demo.launch
Important: Configure the config files in the config folder of the simple-reachability folder to get the result you like. There is one for each node. You will find a documentation of all parameters in the configuration file.
To run the calculation of the workspace for your robot, run:
roslaunch simple-reachability calculate_workspace.launch
This will calculate the workspace in the way you defined in the calculation.yaml. You can provide an end-effector orientation and calculate the constant orientation workspace with a given end-effector orientation or you can focus on the simple reachable workspace by defining a Goal Orientation Tolerance
The calculation could take some time depending on the resolution. The node will let you see the current progress and the estimated time to finish. If you want to speed up the calculation you could use IKFast to make moveit find a valid plan a lot faster.
After the calculation has finished, the result will be published on the /calculate_workspace/visualization_marker topic. You can easily visualize it by adding the display type Marker in RVIZ.
To not loose the workspace calculation result, the node wil save it in a rosbag in the simple-reachability bags folder with an unique name.
Hint: After changing the config files, you should restart your roscore to reset the ROS params. Think about embedding simple-reachability in the moveit launch-file for your robot.
If you want to visualize a previously calculated workspace, you can run:
roslaunch simple-reachability visualize_workspace.launch
Make sure you provide the name of the file you want to run in the visualization.yaml.
Now you can visualize the workspace by adding a Marker with the topic /visualize_workspace/visualization_marker in RVIZ.
In the config file you can modify which part of the workspace you can see. For example you could cut it to only see the LEFT_HEMISPHERE for better visualization.
Feel free to improve the code or implement some new features. Feature requests or bugs can be reported as Issue.