Extensions to reactive self-collision avoidance for torque and position controlled humanoids

One of the fundamental demands on robotic systems is a safe interaction with their environment. For fulfilling that condition, both collisions with obstacles and the own structure have to be avoided. We address the problem of self collisions and propose an algorithm for its avoidance which is based on artificial repulsion potential fields and applicable to both torque and position controlled manipulators. To this end, we design a damping that incorporates the configuration dependance of the robot. For a maximum level of safety, an additional emergency brake strategy based on kinetic energy considerations is introduced for situations in which self collisions are not avoidable by the controller. Experiments are performed on DLR's humanoid Justin.