Analytical Collision Detection for Cylindrical Rigid Bodies

Introduction

This repository contains the code for the analytical collision detection between cylindrical rigid bodies. It is a reproduction of the method described in the paper Collision detection of cylindrical rigid bodies for motion planning.

This algorithm uses line geometry and dual number algebra to exploit the geometry of right circular cylindrical objects to facilitate the detection of collisions.

Quick Start

The code is written in Python 3.7. To run the code, you need to install the following packages:

• numpy
• scipy

The test.ipynb notebook contains a simple example of the collision detection between two cylinders. You will need to define the parameters of the two cylinders in dictionary format:

cylinder1 = {
    "direct": np.array([1, 1, 1]),
    "center": np.array([1, 0, 0]),
    "radius": 1,
    "height": 1
}
cylinder2 = {
    "direct": np.array([0, 0, 1]),
    "center": np.array([-0.75, -0.9, 0]),
    "radius": 1,
    "height": 1
}

The notebook will visualize the two cylinders and the collision detection result:

Then you can call the check_collision function to check if the two cylinders collide:

check_collision(cylinder1, cylinder2)

It will return True if the two cylinders collide, otherwise it will return False.

Reference

[1] J. Ketchel and P. Larochelle, “Collision detection of cylindrical rigid bodies for motion planning,” in Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006., Orlando, FL, USA: IEEE, 2006, pp. 1530–1535. doi: 10.1109/ROBOT.2006.1641925.

[2] R. G. Chittawadigi and S. K. Saha, "An analytical method to detect collision between cylinders using dual number algebra," 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Tokyo, Japan, 2013, pp. 5353-5358, doi: 10.1109/IROS.2013.6697131.

TODO

• There are bugs remaining when the central axis of the cylinder are coplanar.