Anticollision techniques in multirobot environments

The use of multiple assembly robots operating in a shared workspace provides the promise of efficient and flexible assembly operations, but greatly increases the potential for catatrophic damage in the event of robot collisions. The paper describes some of the present techniques used for path planning and collision avoidance and discusses the problems involved in applying them to practical robot workcells. A new path-checking system is described which has been designed to operate in real time and to check for collisions between arbitrarily shaped robots and objects in the workspace, and which will speed path planning by acting as a high-speed validation utility