how to obtain the location of a point with respect to the global coordinate system in vrml

I have created a vrml project of a robotic arm with the code for controlling the simulation in matlab. Trouble I am facing is how to obtain the global coordinate of a center of a shape like a box. which is a children of a transform node and not in the top level. I tried the following code but it gives center with respect to the local coordinate system

wh=vrworld('Robot1.wrl'); 
open(wh);
view(wh);
a=wh.gripper.center

Answer 1

[Jan Houska]

If you want to read global coordinates, it is recommended to wrap the object by a Transform node. Then, it is possible to read the coordinates of that Transform node with the "_abs" suffix, which returns global coordinates. E.g.

Node.translation_abs

Please see the

vrmanipul_global

model for an example of reading global coordinates.