Robot Workbench
The Robot Workbench is unmaintained. If you have experience with the topic and are interested in maintaining it, please state your intention in the developer's section of the FreeCAD forum.
The reason this workbench is still in the master source code is because it is programmed in C++. If this workbench could be programmed in Python, then it could be made an external workbench and it could be moved to a separate repository.
Introduction
The Robot Workbench is a tool to simulate a standard 6-axis industrial robot, like Kuka.
You can do the following tasks:
- Set up a simulation environment with a robot and work pieces.
- Create and fill up movement trajectories.
- Decompose features of a CAD part to a trajectory.
- Simulate the robot movement and reaching distance.
- Export the trajectory to a robot program file.
To get started try the Robot tutorial, and see the programming interface in the RobotExample.py example file.
Robot workbench icon
Tools
Here the principal commands you can use to create a robot set-up.
Robots
The tools to create and manage the 6-Axis robots
Create a robot: Insert a new robot into the scene
Simulate a trajectory: Opens the simulation dialog and lets you simulate
Export a trajectory: Export a robot program file
Set home position: Set the home position of a robot
Restore home position: move the robot to its home position
Trajectories
Tools to create and manipulate trajectories. There are two kinds, the parametric and non parametric ones.
Non parametric trajectories
Create a trajectory: Inserts a new empty trajectory-object into the scene
Set the default orientation: Set the orientation way-points gets created by default
Set the default speed parameter: Set the default values for way-point creation
Insert a waypoint: Insert a way-point from the current robot position into a trajectory
Insert a waypoint preselected: Insert a way-point from the current mouse position into a trajectory
Parametric trajectories
Create a trajectory out of edges: Insert a new object which decompose edges to a trajectory
Dress-up a trajectory: Lets you override one or more properties of a trajectory
Trajectory compound: Create a compound out of some single trajectories
Scripting
See the Robot API example for a description of the functions used to model the robot displacements.