Reuleaux: Robot Base Placement by Reachability Analysis

Before beginning any robot task, users must position the robot's base, a task that now depends entirely on user intuition. While slight perturbation is tolerable for robots with moveable bases, correcting the problem is imperative for fixed-base robots if some essential task sections are out of reach. For mobile manipulation robots, it is necessary to decide on a specific base position before beginning manipulation tasks. This paper presents Reuleaux, an open source library for robot reachability analyses and base placement. It reduces the amount of extra repositioning and removes the manual work of identifying potential base locations. Based on the reachability map, base placement locations of a whole robot or only the arm can be efficiently determined. This can be applied to both statically mounted robots, where position of the robot and work piece ensure the maximum amount of work performed, and to mobile robots, where the maximum amount of workable area can be reached. Solutions are not limited only to vertically constrained placement, since complicated robotics tasks require the base to be placed at unique poses based on task demand. All Reuleaux library methods were tested on different robots of different specifications and evaluated for tasks in simulation and real world environment. Evaluation results indicate that Reuleaux had significantly improved performance than prior existing methods in terms of time-efficiency and range of applicability.Comment: Submitted to International Conference of Robotic Computing 201

From the Editors - Diverse People, Diverse Approaches

We are proud to announce Praxis’ second volume as a peer-reviewed journal. Our call for articles addressing diversity in the writing center fielded a record number of submissions. We thank all of the authors who submitted careful, insightful, creative and challenging work. We also want to thank our external review board and our editorial team as well as the administrative staff at the Undergraduate Writing Center. Andrea Saathoff, who led Praxis into peerreview status last year and continues to work behind the scenes, deserves a special “Thank you.” This journal, like the writing-center scholarship and pedagogy it supports, exists because of the committed, collaborative work of a broad community of writers and educators. To our authors, reviewers, editors, readers and supporters—Thank you.University Writing Cente