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The development of a collision- and self-collision-avoidance scheme for redundant manipulators is discussed in this paper. The method is based on modeling the arm and its environment by simple geometric primitives (cylinders and spheres). A compact method of detecting collisions between two cylinders is introduced. By resorting to the notions of dual angles and dual vectors for representing the axes of cylinders in space, a characterization of different types of collisions is introduced. The performance of the proposed scheme is demonstrated for a seven degrees-of-freedom redundant manipulator via simulations and experiments. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More problems are involved in collaborating multi-robot-arm systems than in single robot arms. These problems stem from mutual dynamic and kinematic effects between the arms. This work is confined to only the kinematics of two robot arms: other problems like control, force distribution, and so on are not addressed here. A particular case of a material handling problem with two collaborating robot arms loading/unloading long objects from a conveyor is studied. The feasibility, of the task from a kinematics point of view, and the necessary conditions and constraints for the relative set-up of the two manipulators are discussed. These conditions originate from the working envelope of the two arms which depends on three factors: the working envelope of each individual arm, the spacing between them, and the dimensions of the workpiece. To assist this study, an efficient algorithm for determining the two-dimensional contours of the workspace of a single arm is included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]