In robotic systems and autonomous navigation, depth cameras (like RGB-D sensors) represent the surroundings as a 3D point cloud. A robot arm is situated at the origin , and its software needs to calculate distances between detected objects to prevent collisions.
A depth sensor detects a cylindrical obstacle with a safety envelope modeled as a sphere centered at with a radius of . A point obstacle is detected at .
- Find the distance between the robot arm at the origin and the center of the spherical safety envelope .
- Determine the standard equation of the spherical safety envelope.
- Calculate the distance from the point obstacle to the center of the safety envelope . Determine if the point obstacle has breached the safety envelope (i.e., is it inside the sphere?).