The title implies that there are collision check systems that don’t use point clouds (or that robotics has moved onto something else)? Is that true or did the author just mean personally?

Posts like these really highlight how much there to think about in robotics. Below the surface of what immediately comes to mind there is just an abundance of topics to address to get an actually well working robot.

Why don’t they marry the visual categorisation of objects with a sparse predefined model to simplify?

Point clouds seem like a noisy layer to use and better as verification.

This reminds me of writing physics in game engines.