Towards Connecting Control to Perception: High-Performance Whole-Body Collision Avoidance Using Control-Compatible Obstacles

One of the most important aspects of autonomous systems is safety. This includes ensuring safe human-robot and safe robot-environment interaction when autonomously performing complex tasks or in collaborative scenarios. Although several methods have been introduced to tackle this, most are unsuitable for real-time applications and require carefully hand-crafted obstacle descriptions. In this work, we propose a method combining high-frequency and real-time self and environment collision avoidance of a robotic manipulator with low-frequency, multimodal, and high-resolution environmental perceptions accumulated in a digital twin system. Our method is based on geometric primitives, so-called primitive skeletons. These, in turn, are information-compressed and real-time compatible digital representations of the robot's body and environment, automatically generated from ultra-realistic virtual replicas of the real world provided by the digital twin. Our approach is a key enabler for closing the loop between environment perception and robot control by providing the millisecond real-time control stage with a current and accurate world description, empowering it to react to environmental changes. We evaluate our whole-body collision avoidance on a 9-DOFs robot system through five experiments, demonstrating the functionality and efficiency of our framework.Comment: Accepted for publication at 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2023