Quick Collision Detection of Polytopes in Virtual Environments

The problem of collision detection is fundamental to inter active applications such as computer animation and virtual environments In these elds prompt recognition of possible impacts is important for computing real time response We present a simple exact collision detection algorithm for convex polytopes The algorithm nds quickly a separating plane between two polytopes if they are non colliding or else reports collision if it cannot possibly nd a separating plane In the case of non collision the separating plane found for one time frame is cached as a witness for the next time frame an idea borrowed from this use of time coherence further speeds up the algorithm in dynamic applications Both temporal and geometric coherences are exploited to make this algorithm run in expected constant time empirically