Smart collision free motion control for robot arms

A novel collision free motion control scheme is presented for robot arms operating in dynamic environment. The motion control action consists of two parts: goal reaching (GR) and collision avoidance (CA). During execution, the GR action is produced by a potential field-type method (or by human operators in teleoperation), and the CA action is taken by a local-global strategy presented here. Firstly the robot links with collision potential are evaluated and proper CA actions are produced separately for these links without considering other parts of the robot. Then, a global fusion mechanism synthesizes all of these local commands to meet the CA requirement from every link facing potential collisions. The fusion policy is giving higher priority to the link with higher collision probability. The local-global strategy takes full advantages of robot freedom to realize more smart CA actions and dexterous performance in complex environment. Another merit of this method is to drastically simplify the design of whole robot body CA.