In practice all the geometrical parameters are submitted to
constraints. For example the distances must satisfy
, the angle
must be such that
where
is a unit vector that describes the main orientation
of the ball-and-socket joint at
and
is the maximal
possible rotation of this joint. All these constraints imply that
the value of the elements of
are restricted to lie in a
specific region embedded in the 6-dimensional space, this region being
called the reachable workspace of the robot as the points of
this region define all the position/orientation that can be reached by
the platform.
In some cases it is possible to find an analytical description of the workspace (for example if the orientation is fixed and only the distance constraints are taken into account) but as soon as all the constraints are taken into account such analytical form is difficult to obtain. Interval analysis allows to obtain an approximation of the workspace as a set of 6-dimensional boxes. It is only an approximation as the algorithm, based on a classical bisection method, discard boxes whose width is lower than a given threshold. At the same time it is possible to obtain a bound on the error between the volume of the approximation and the volume of the workspace. For more details see [11]. A variant of the algorithm allows to solve efficiently a very practical problem: is a given region included in the reachable workspace of the robot ?