RVS is a piece of software that was developed at McGill University's
Centre for Intelligent Machines. Its name is an acronym for Robot
Visualization System. The software is written in C and works on Silicon
Graphics workstations. RVS creates superb 3D graphics and is quite easy to
use. RVS is an extremely useful 3D visual tool to determine the
feasibility of a new robot design or of a Cartesian robotic path. A
robot is rendered by simply reading the Denavit-Hartenberg (DH)
parameters of the robot at hand from a file. Immediately, the skeleton of
the robot, i.e., its representation as a chain composed of rigid links
and either revolute or prismatic joints, without geometric details on
the physical shape of the links, is generated and can be examined. The
full rendering of the actual robot can also be viewed, but this requires,
of course, that a database with the details of the robot-link geometry
be available.
The rvs software is available here: rvs.tar.gz
with the README file: README.txt
After the robot data, either its skeleton or its full rendering, are
entered into RVS, the user can rotate and translate the robot as
well as zoom in and out. RVS offers the features below:
- - Each joint variable can be controlled individually. Joint limits
can also be taken into account;
- - the robot can be controlled in the Cartesian space;
- - the robot can move to prestored postures;
- - an icon representation of the frame axes can be displayed on top
of the robot display;
- - the robot can follow a prestored trajectory.
