As mobile robots get bigger and more powerful, the need to prevent them from bumping into things becomes more important. Impact bumpers won't cut it on a robot the size of a car. A NewScientist.com article describes the Inevitable Collision System (ICS), a collision-avoidance system designed by French and Japanese reseachers. Thierry Fraichard presented a paper on the system at the recent IROS conference. ICS works by continuously calculating an exclusion zone around the robot representing a region in which a collision would be unavoidable, no matter what evasive action the robot took. While the ICS paper is not yet available to the public, Fraichard's earlier paper on the Inevitable Collision States (Post Script format) is.