robot_collision_checking: A Lightweight ROS 2 Interface to FCL (Flexible Collision Library)

Abstract

This paper presents robot_collision_checking, a C++ library that provides a Robot Operating System (ROS) interface to the Flexible Collision Library (FCL) for typical robotics applications. FCL is an open-source C++ library that provides efficient collision detection and distance computation for 3D environments. While these capabilities are crucial in robotics to ensure safety and enable effective motion planning, FCL is not readily available for many robot architectures built atop ROS. Given that the robotics community widely relies on ROS as the standard for software development, it would greatly benefit from a lightweight ROS interface to FCL. The robot_collision_checking package fulfils this demand by exposing FCL functionality to ROS message types, thereby allowing robotics researchers and practitioners that rely on ROS to easily access the collision and distance checking features of FCL.