A collision-avoidance scheme for redundant manipulators: Theory and experiments

The development of a collision- and self-collision-avoidance scheme for redundant manipulators is discussed in this paper. The method is based on modeling the arm and its environment by simple geometric primitives (cylinders and spheres). A compact method of detecting collisions between two cylinders is introduced. By resorting to the notions of dual angles and dual vectors for representing the axes of cylinders in space, a characterization of different types of collisions is introduced. The performance of the proposed scheme is demonstrated for a seven degrees-of-freedom redundant manipulator via simulations and experiments.