A study of the clash detection problem in robotics

To solve the clash detection problem we must decide whether a collision will occur between any pair of objects from a set of objects with known shapes and motions. We have considered three methods for performing clash detection: in the first we sample the motion at a finite number of times and perform interference detection at each time; in the second we create models of the shapes and their motions in space-time, and look for intersections between these four-dimensional entities; and in the third we create models of the volumes swept out by the objects. This paper is a brief, comparative study of these three methods, and includes some details of our experiments with the first two methods as implemented in a geometric modelling system.