RobotSDF: Implicit Morphology Modeling for the Robotic Arm

The expression of robot arm morphology is a critical foundation for achieving effective motion planning and collision avoidance in robotic systems. Traditional geometry-based approaches usually suffer from the contradiction between the high demand for computing resources for fine expression and the insufficient detail expression caused by the pursuit of efficiency. The signed distance function addresses these drawbacks due to its ability to handle complex and arbitrary shapes and lower computational requirements. However, conventional robotic morphology methods based on the signed distance function often face challenges when the robot moves dynamically, since robots with different postures are modeled as independent individuals but the postures of robots are infinite. In this paper, we introduce RobotSDF, an implicit morphology modeling approach that can express the robot shape of arbitrary posture precisely. Instead of depicting a whole model of the robot arm, RobotSDF models the robot morphology as integrated implicit joint models driven by joint configurations. In this approach, the dynamic shape change process of the robot is converted into the coordinate transformations of query points within each joint's coordinate system. Experimental results with the Elfin robot demonstrate that RobotSDF can accurately depict robot shapes across different postures up to the millimeter level, which exhibits 38.65% and 66.24% improvement over the Neural-JSDF and configuration space distance field algorithms, respectively, in representing robot morphology. We further verified the efficiency of RobotSDF through collision avoidance in both simulation and actual human-robot collaboration experiments.