Collision Detector for Industrial Robot Manipulators

The increasingly complex tasks require an enormous effort in path planning within dynamic environments. This paper presents a efficient method for detecting collisions between a robot and its environment in order to prevent dangerous maneuvers. Our methods is based upon the transformation of each robot link and the environment in a set of bounding boxes. The aim of this kind of prismatic approximation is to detect a collision between objects in the workspace by testing collision between boxes from different objects. The computational cost of this approach has been tested in simulations, thus we have set up our environment with a HP20D robot and an obstacle, both represented by their corresponding chain of bounding boxes. The experiment implies to move the robot from an initial position, on the right of the obstacle, to a final position, on the left side of the obstacle, along a straight-line trajectory. The probe enabled us to check the correct behavior of a collision detector in a real situation.