Fast Algorighms for Penetration and Contact Determination between Non-Convex Polyhedral Models

This paper presents fast algorithms for penetration and contact determination between general polyhedral models in dynamic environments. The main contribution is an extension of an earlier expected constant time algorithm between convex polytopes to detect penetrations and contacts. For each pair of non-convex polyhedral models, the algorithm uses the convex hull of each object to determine which regions of the objects are colliding. After identifying these regions, it uses a new dynamic technique, sweep and prune, to overcome the bottleneck of O(n 2) pairwise feature checks of these regions. The resulting algorithm has been implemented and in practice its performance in dynamic environments is O(n + m), where m corresponds to the number of feature pairs close to each other.