Collision avoidance for industrial robots with arbitrary motion

For effective application of industrial robots in flexible manufacturing systems and in automatic assembly, guided automatic collision avoidance is an important and—in spite of many applications—so far unsolved problem. The basis is unconstrained path control of each robot controlled, for example, by optical sensors in connection with different priority levels assigned to the robots. Iterative, time-consuming, hierarchical control methods are not applicable due to the complexity and the real-time constraints of this task. As a new and successful approach the application of various hierarchical decision strategies in connection with extremely time-efficient evaluation of decision tables is presented. This concept is based on a suitable description of the actual possible collision spaces.