HIGH-PERFORMANCE MULTI-BODY COLLISION DETECTION FOR THE REAL-TIME CONTROL OF A CTS SYSTEM

This paper presents a high performance methodology for the real-time implementation of collision detection on a Captive Trajectory Simulation (CTS) system. The CTS system includes a slow-moving redundant robot manipulator operating inside a wind tunnel environment with transonic conditions. Collisions can occur between robot links or the links and other objects present in the environment. A multi-body dynamic pruning method is proposed based on joint velocity bounds, which can significantly reduce the number of required collision checks without compromising the system’s safety due to its conservative assumptions. A balance is achieved between the accuracy and the speed of computations via the convex subhull subdivision of the objects, which reduces the geometrical details to further decrease the load of computations. Combining the above two strategies results in smaller and more consistent sample times allowing the collision detection to run in real-time as an integral part of a robot with a high speed co...