AbstractIn order to realize collision‐free coordination of multiple robots, it is crucial to model the robots in a computer adequately and to detect existence or nonexistence of an interference between them on the basis of data structure of the robot models. Motivated by this observation, this article proposes a new solid model named “Hierarchical Sphere Model” (HSM) for modeling moving objects (robots) and presents a feasible algorithm for checking an interference between them on the basis of HSM. HSM arranges region informations in a hierarchical tree structure whose nodes correspond to spherical regions. On the basis of hierarchy of HSM, the algorithm checks only intersections between HSMs' nodes which are close to each other, and hence it works efficiently even if the objects have complicated shape. Furthermore, because a node of HSM represents a spherical region, intersection between, two nodes can be easily found just by calculating the distance between two spheres corresponding to them no matter how the objects move. Finally, the efficiency of the algorithm is demonstrated by several experi
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