Fast collision detection for realistic multiple moving robots

Practical robot motion planning for multiple moving objects in large complex scenarios requires very fast collision detection. We present an approach to collision detection between multiple moving objects for robot motion planning. It is based on a spherical hierarchy of detail. The objects can be non-convex and curved and they are not decomposed into convex ones. We present results that show the stability of the approach with respect to the number of polygons used to model the scene. Numerical evidence of the efficiency of the algorithm is also shown with several experiments, obtaining average intersection detection times of a few milliseconds for two closely moving robots involving 1,900 polygons. A parallel version of the algorithm is also described with which computation times of around one millisecond are obtained in an average case.