Novel Probabilistic Collision Detection for Manipulator Motion Planning Using HNSW

Abstract

Collision detection is very important for robot motion planning. The existing accurate collision detection algorithms regard the evaluation of each node as a discrete event, ignoring the correlation between nodes, resulting in low efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that transforms collision detection into a binary classification problem. In particular, the proposed method searches the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) of the new node and estimates its collision probability by the prior node. We perform the hierarchical navigable small world (HNSW) method to query the nearest neighbor data and store the detected nodes to build the database incrementally. In addition, this research develops a KNN query technique tailored for linear data, incorporating threshold segmentation to facilitate collision detection along continuous paths. Moreover, it refines the distance function of the collision classifier to enhance the precision of probability estimations. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.