Collision Avoidance

Giskard uses a potential field based collision avoidance schema. The bullet library is used to compute closest points between all link in the world tree.

These closest points are used by constraints that push the two links away from each other, until they surpass certain thresholds that can be configured. This approach is not "smart" enough to move around objects, when a robot is standing directly in front of it. Instead the robot might get stuck in a local minimum, if the actual pushed in the opposite direction of the collision avoidance.

Another problem of this approach is the closest points may change rapidly, e.g., if two boxes are parallel to each other, resulting in shaking.