A general procedure for collision detection between an industrial robot and the environment

A general procedure for collision detection between an industrial robot and the environment is proposed in this paper. The procedure does not use any external sensor, and does not rely on any particular information about the specific robot on which it is applied, so that it can be easily implemented in the software architecture of different manipulators without any customization. Experimental results on both lightweight and heavyweight industrial manipulators confirm its validity and the absence of false collision detections during standard work-cycles.