Automatic collision detection and avoidance in a peg-in-hole process with ToF sensor

Industrial robot based production and assembly automation increases the throughput of a company but on the other hand enhances the need for robot intelligence in terms of decision making in collisions scenarios. A robot manipulator, working at the industrial facility, should be able to predict potential collisions and automatically prevent them with a safe detour around the obstacle/human. Industrial robots at the moment are able to detect collisions after a real contact with the obstacle but the existing proposals for avoiding collisions are either computationally expensive, need prior information about the obstacles or not very well adapted to the safety standards. This paper introduces an obstacle mapping based approach to localize the un-known, un-programmed obstacles and propose a safe detour to the robot without stopping the peg-in-hole assembly process in a static environment. A Time of Flight (ToF) sensor is used to capture the 3D information from the environment that is used to localize objects in the scene. The proposed quick and robust solution obtained currently for robot collision detection and avoidance is in static environment and will be adapted to dynamic obstacle avoidance in perspectives. Keywords—Collisions detection and avoidance, Industrial Robot; Path Planning; Peg-in-hole process; Timeof-flight sensor