text: 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.
  @cite_13: The utility of a mobile manipulator largely depends on its kinematic structure and mounting point on the robot body. The reachable workspace of the robot can be obtained offline and modeled as a discretized map called Reachability map. A Capability map is obtained by including some quality measure for the local dexterity of the manipulator, which helps to identify good and bad regions for manipulation. Once the maps are obtained based on forward or inverse kinematic methods, they can be used for numerous analysis tasks such as robot kinematics and workspace quality assessment, robot mounting point analysis or redundancy and failure analysis. This paper covers basic aspects of the Reachability and Capability map generation and storage, and shows particular applications of the maps for space robotics.
summary: These methods allow planning for simple tasks, but they require a task to be completely specified prior to evaluation. @cite_13 explores the case where a specific trajectory is not given; rather the task has been simplified into a generalized workspace environment where the robot must work. Here, competing constraints are given. However the operator still evaluates and confirms the final base placement of the robot on the mobile platform. For a simple operation with few operating points, this can be done manually, but for more complex parts and tasks such as welding pipes or assembling parts in constrained spaces, a manual approach for validation may not be feasible.