ABSTRACT
An important topic in planning and controlling the motion of robot systems is that of intersection and proximity detection. That is, given a specific configuration of the system subparts, and the position and orientation of all the obstacles present in the robot's workspace, we wish to determine whether at this configuration there occurs an intersection between a moving robot subpart and a stationary obstacle, or between two separately moving subparts of the robot. This particular form of the problem arises when checking a prescribed planned motion of the robot for collision avoidance, by dividing the path into short segments and by checking whether an intersection would occur for the position of the robot system at the beginning of each such segment.
