Safe human-robot interaction based on dynamic sphere-swept line bounding volumes

This paper presents a geometric representation for human operators and robotic manipulators, which cooperate in the development of flexible tasks. The main goal of this representation is the implementation of real-time proximity queries, which are used by safety strategies for avoiding dangerous collisions between humans and robotic manipulators. This representation is composed of a set of bounding volumes based on swept-sphere line primitives, which encapsulate their links more precisely than previous sphere-based models. The radius of each bounding volume does not only represent the size of the encapsulated link, but it also includes an estimation of its motion. The radii of these dynamic bounding volumes are obtained from an algorithm which computes the linear velocity of each link. This algorithm has been implemented for the development of a safety strategy in a real human–robot interaction task.This work is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the projects DPI2005-06222 and DPI2008-02647 and the grant AP2005-1458

Time Advancement and Bounds Intersection Checking for Faster Broad-Phase Collision Detection of Paired Object Trajectories

For self-driving mechanisms, the motion planning requires a reasonably fast algorithm for collision detection along the trajectories. We present three algorithms for the detection of collision among objects with predefined trajectories. The first algorithm uses the intersection of the path’s bounding box. The second algorithm sequentially checks for intersection between each pair of corresponding axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABB) from the trajectories of the two paths. Lastly, the latter algorithm is modified using iterative time advancement to an estimated earliest possible collision time. Simulation experiments on a variety of pair trajectories demonstrate a significant speedup of the proposed algorithms over the existing baseline algorithm. They are, therefore, preferable alternatives for faster broad-phase collision detection in applications such as motion planning

New Geometric Data Structures for Collision Detection

We present new geometric data structures for collision detection and more, including: Inner Sphere Trees - the first data structure to compute the peneration volume efficiently. Protosphere - an new algorithm to compute space filling sphere packings for arbitrary objects. Kinetic AABBs - a bounding volume hierarchy that is optimal in the number of updates when the objects deform. Kinetic Separation-List - an algorithm that is able to perform continuous collision detection for complex deformable objects in real-time. Moreover, we present applications of these new approaches to hand animation, real-time collision avoidance in dynamic environments for robots and haptic rendering, including a user study that exploits the influence of the degrees of freedom in complex haptic interactions. Last but not least, we present a new benchmarking suite for both, peformance and quality benchmarks, and a theoretic analysis of the running-time of bounding volume-based collision detection algorithms