Collision Avoidance for Redundant 7-DOF Robots Using a Critically Damped Dynamic Approach

Abstract

The presence of collaborative robots in industrial environments requires that their control strategies include collision avoidance in the generation of trajectories. In general, collision avoidance is performed via additional displacements of the kinematic chain that make the robot move far from the objects that are occasionally inserted into its safety workspace. The variability of the coordinates of the collision points inside the safety volume leads to abrupt movements for the robot. This paper presents a general method for smoothing abrupt movements in robots with one degree of redundancy for collision-avoidance trajectories, employing a second-order digital filter designed with adjustable critical damping. The method is illustrated by applying it to a redundant robot with a spherical–revolute–spherical type (SRS-type) kinematic chain, which is a benchmark used to test the algorithms ideated for solving this problem. This paper also presents an alternative algorithm for the inverse kinematics of the SRS-type robot and the computational experiments that show the collision avoidance proposal’s performance and its properties through graphical results.