CAMBRIDGE, MA—Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a safety check technique that can prove with 100 percent accuracy that a robot’s trajectory will remain collision-free. Their method, which is so precise it can discriminate between trajectories that differ by only millimeters, provides proof in only a few seconds.
The engineers used a special algorithmic technique called sum-of-squares programming and adapted it to effectively solve the safety check problem. Using sum-of-squares programming enables their method to generalize to a wide range of complex motions.