Methods to Perform a Reach Study

Hello,

I am new to Visual Components, and I am looking for some advice on the best way to perform a reach study on a robot. I have already performed a reach study in another software, but their inverse kinematic solver was limited, so I am trying to perform a similar reach study in Visual Components.

In this other software, I have a single robot reaching various points on a large work piece. I want to maximize the number of points I can reach, so I iterate through a variety of end effector geometries, heights off the ground, and distances away from the part. At each combination of the above variables, I attempt to reach each point on the work piece. At each point, I specify a motion for the robot to perform, like it’s scanning a hole for example. If the motion can be completed without collision, I write to a spreadsheet that the point is reachable. If the point cannot be reached, it iterates through every available configuration of the robot and attempts the motion again. This entire process was automated in a Python script, but I ran into some issues with it not being able to provide an analytical solution for the inverse kinematics for the robot I want to analyze.

Is automating everything in a script still the best way to go to perform a reach study like this, or is there a better way in Visual Components? Is there a different, simpler method to optimize the geometry of a robot base or TCP location?

I see there is Python and .NET functionality, is there a benefit to using one over the other when performing a reach study?

Thanks in advance for the help!