Human-robot co-operation becomes increasingly frequent due to the widespread use of service robots. However, during such co-operation, robots have a high chance of colliding with humans, which may result in serious injury. Thus, many solutions were proposed to ensure collision safety, and among them, collision detection algorithms are regarded as one of the most practical solutions. They allow a robot to quickly detect a collision so that the robot can perform a proper reaction to minimize the impact. However, conventional collision detection algorithms required the precise model of a robot, which is difficult to obtain and is subjected to change. Also, expensive sensors, such as torque sensors, are often required. In this study, we propose a novel collision detection algorithm which only requires motor encoders. It detects collisions by monitoring the high-pass filtered version of the velocity error. The proposed algorithm can be easily implemented to any robots, and its performance was verified through various tests.