Robot collision avoidance

Planning for collision avoidance is essential in any robot application, but for most single robot cells the ancillary equipment and tooling remain in fixed and known positions relative to the cell and thus collision avoidance strategies can be planned once only, at the start of program development. With multiple robot cells not only do the robots have to avoid the tools and furniture of the cell but also one another. The technology to allow robots to navigate around objects and select optimum paths is still not as cheap or reliable as would be required for use in standard manufacturing applications. Concludes that multiple robots in the same space can have many advantages and the technology exists to allow them to work together in an unsynchronized manner, checking for collisions before each movement, but that technology currently requires considerable effort on the part of robot users to develop and test their own software.