In intelligent robots capable of autonomous work, the development of a high-performance special-purpose VLSI processor for collison detection will become very important for automatic motion planning. Conventionally, this kind of processing is performed by general-purpose processors. In this paper, a first collision detection VLSI processor is proposed to achieve ultrahigh-performance processing with an ideal parallel processing scheme. A large number of coordinate transformations and memory accesses to the obstacle memory are fully utilized in the processing algorithm, so that direct collision detection can be executed with a VLSI-oriented regular data flow. The structure of each processing element (PE) is very simple because a PE mainly consists of a COordinate Rotation DIgital Computer (CORDIC) arithmetic unit for the coordinate transformation and memories for the storage of manipulator and obstacle information. When 100 PE's are used to make parallel processing, the performance is about 10 000 times faster than that of conventional approaches using a single general-purpose microprocessor.