Minimal distance calculation between the industrial robot and its workspace based on circle/polygon-slices representation

摘要

The real-time and reliable collision detection is the vital basis for the robotic motion control in real applications. In this work, the minimal distance calculation between the industrial robot and its workspace is presented. This method first uses circular/polygonal slices to represent robotic sub-structures with curved edges more accurately, and uses polygonal planes to construct its workspace. Being the basis of the distance calculation, the shortest distance between the spatial circle/polygon and the polygonal plane, as well as that between the circular/polygonal plane and the polygonal plane are first modelled through spatial relation analysis. The simulation validation indicates that the proposed algorithm is more efficient and reliable than both the point-clouds-based and bounding-volume-hierarchies-based algorithms. And the influence of the refinement size on the performance of the proposed model is revealed. Finally, the application example shows that this work is a significant contribution for the collision-free motion control of the industrial robot. The proposed algorithm can also be applied to the distance calculation of other complex objects because of the generality of the proposed slices representation way.