Reviving and modernising Robotic Workbench

FreeCAD comes with a Robot Workbench, which is capable of 6-DOF robot simulations, trajectory planning and a vendor specific code export (KUKA). After the removal of some copyrighted model assets and years without an active maintainer, the workbench is functional but difficult to use and customise. The robots can only be defined via hand-written VRML and CSV/DH files, the bundled kinematics library has lagged behind the latest upstream release, the axis count for robots is hard coded to six and the documentation for beginners is sparse. Thus this project proposes an incremental modernization of the existing “Mod/Robot” module: 1. Standardised robot imports : Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) is one of the most common standards for describing a robot. Having an easy way to import robots directly from URDF will replace the painful CSV/DH file imports. 2. Generic joint-trajectory export : Having the possibility to export the joint & trajectory data will separate the export process from copyrighted vendor-specific pipelines. The users can post-process the exported data to their specific platform 3. Kinematics library refresh : FreeCAD currently has a local fork of KDL library that lags behind the upstream. Cleaning up this dependency will eventually prepare the path for arbitrary-DOF robots & better robot animations. 4. Documentation : This will help the existing users as well as attract a new user base towards the Robotics Workbench.