Sipu Ruan, Xiaoli Wang, Gregory Chirikjian

Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore

Published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)

Abstract

This paper studies the narrow phase collision detection problem for two general unions of convex bodies encapsulated by smooth surfaces. The approach, namely CFC (Closed-Form Contact space), is based on parameterizing their contact space in closed-form. The first body is dilated to form the contact space while the second is shrunk to a point. Then, the collision detection is formulated as finding the closest point on the parametric contact space with the center of the second body. Numerical solutions are proposed based on the point-to-surface distance as well as the common-normal concept. Furthermore, when the two bodies are moving or under linear deformations, their first time of contact is solved continuously along the time-parameterized trajectories. Benchmark studies are conducted for the proposed algorithms in terms of solution stability and computational cost. Applications of the sampling-based motion planning for robot manipulators are demonstrated.

Links

• Paper
• Code:
  • Core C++ library, API documentation: templated header-only library for collision detection algorithms
  • ROS package: application in motion planning, including visualization
  • MATLAB implementation: MATLAB version for algorithms. It also includes visualizaions for figures in the paper and benchmark results from C++ implementations.

Supplementary Video

Citation

If you find our work useful in your research, please consider citing:

• S. Ruan, X. Wang and G. S. Chirikjian, “Collision Detection for Unions of Convex Bodies With Smooth Boundaries Using Closed-Form Contact Space Parameterization,” in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 9485-9492, Oct. 2022, doi: 10.1109/LRA.2022.3190629.

• BibTeX

  @ARTICLE{ruan2022collision,
  author={Ruan, Sipu and Wang, Xiaoli and Chirikjian, Gregory S.},
  journal={IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters}, 
  title={Collision Detection for Unions of Convex Bodies With Smooth Boundaries Using Closed-Form Contact Space Parameterization}, 
  year={2022},
  volume={7},
  number={4},
  pages={9485-9492},
  doi={10.1109/LRA.2022.3190629}}