Real-time collision avoidance algorithm on industrial manipulators

Safety is a fundamental issue in robotics, especially in the growing application of human-robot interaction (HRI), where collision avoidance is an important consideration. In this paper, a novel real-time velocity based collision avoidance planner is presented to address this problem. The proposed algorithm provides a solution to deal with both collision avoidance and reference tracking simultaneously. An invariant safe set is introduced to exclude the dangerous states that may lead to collision, and a smoothing function is introduced to adapt different reference commands and to preserve the invariant property of the safe set. A real-time experiment with a moving obstacle is conducted on FANUC LR Mate 200iD/7L.