System for automatic collisions prevention for a manipulator arm of a mobile robot

Control systems of mobile robots controlled remotely by a human operator using only limited visual feedback from camera subsystem can aid the operator in various ways. This paper deals with automatic collision detection for manipulator arm mounted on a mobile robot - the goal of the system is to prevent any possible collisions between the arm and the robot or the arm itself. Implementation of the system uses the separating axis algorithm on pairs of oriented bounding boxes enveloping mechanical components of the robot. Practical testing of the whole control system was done on two existing mobile robots.