Probabilistic collision detection between noisy point clouds using robust classification

Abstract

We present a new collision detection algorithm to perform contact computations between noisy point cloud data. Our approach takes into account the uncertainty that arises due to discretization error and noise, and formulates collision checking as a two-class classification problem. We use techniques from machine learning to compute the collision probability for each point in the input data and accelerate the computation using stochastic traversal of bounding volume hierarchies. We highlight the performance of our algorithm on point clouds captured using PR2 sensors as well as synthetic data sets, and show that our approach can provide a fast and robust solution for handling uncertainty in contact computations.