Analytic collision anticipation technology considering agents' future behavior

Abstract

This paper presents a collision anticipation method that shows when and where collisions will occur in configuration time space by considering the future behavior of agents. Previous solutions to collision anticipation have mainly focused on generating immediate reactive solutions to time-varying environments because of the high inaccuracy of sensors and a heavy computation burden. However, the recent rapid growth in sensor and estimation technology has led to a need for new systems that consider agents' future behavior explicitly. Based on this need, we formalized a mathematical approach to collision anticipation and proposed a tool, the 3-D triangular collision object(TCO), that informs a robot where and when collisions will occur over all possible heading angles. This formulation greatly reduced computation loads. Considering that this result is especially advantageous to fast moving robots, a full-speed collision-free (FSCF) motion planner is proposed based on the TCO. In real experiments, analytic solutions from the planner were modified to compensate for sensor error, and finally yielded safe motions for fast moving robots.