Collision Avoidance with Proximity Servoing for Redundant Serial Robot Manipulators

Collision avoidance is a key technology towards safe human-robot interaction, especially on-line and fastreacting motions are required. Skins with proximity sensors mounted on the robot’s outer shell provide an interesting approach to occlusion-free and low-latency perception. However, collision avoidance algorithms which make extensive use of these properties for fast-reacting motions have not yet been fully investigated. We present an improved collision avoidance algorithm for proximity sensing skins by formulating a quadratic optimization problem with inequality constraints to compute instantaneous optimal joint velocities. Compared to common repulsive force methods, our algorithm confines the approach velocity to obstacles and keeps motions pointing away from obstacles unrestricted. Since with repulsive motions the robot only moves in one direction, opposite to obstacles, our approach has better exploitation of the redundancy space to maintain the task motion and gets stuck less likely in local minima. Furthermore, our method incorporates an active behaviour for avoiding obstacles and evaluates all potentially colliding obstacles for the whole arm, rather than just the single nearest obstacle. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with simulations and on real robot manipulators in comparison with commonly used repulsive force methods and our prior proposed approach.