Determination of the Minimum Distance Between Moving Objects Including Velocity Information

Abstract

Abstract The rapid determination of the minimum distance between objects is of importance in collision avoidance for a robot maneuvering among obstacles. Currently, the fastest algorithms for the solution of this problem are based on the use of optimization techniques to minimize a distance function. Furthermore, to date this problem has been approached purely through the position kinematics of the two objects. However, although the minimum distance between two objects can be found quickly on state-of-the-art hardware, the modelling of realistic scenes entails the determination of the minimum distances between large numbers of pairs of objects, and the computation time to calculate the overall minimum distance between any two objects is significant, and introduces a delay which has serious repercussions on the real-time control of the robot. This paper presents a technique to modify the original optimization problem in order to include velocity information. In effect, the minimum distance calculation is performed at a future time step by projecting the effect of present velocity. This method has proven to give good results on a 6-dof robot maneuvering among obstacles, and has allowed a complete compensation of the lags incurred due to computational delays.