Adjustable Approach for Collision Detection in Virtual Prototype Environments

Collision detection is an important task for the simulation of interactions in virtual assembly. This paper presents a novel collision detection algorithm that uses bounding volumes (BV) of different complexity to find intersecting surfaces interactively. This approach uses the surface knowledge available from the CAD model efficiently to build a hierarchical collision detection algorithm. This method also uses different types of bounding volumes with the advantage that is possible to choose the bounding volumes that are more suitable for each type of application. In this way, the user can allow the existence of different types of bounding volumes in simultaneous and he/her can adjust the selection of BVs to the most effective for the determination of intersecting surfaces.