A collision detection for interactive mechanical assembly simulation

Physical mockups of an assembly are used to check whether the design is assemblable by interactively manipulating the mockup. It would benefit the design process greatly if the interactive assemblability check can be conducted virtually during the design process, a virtual assembly simulation. In order to realize the interactive simulation, real time collision detection is the most important prerequisite. Furthermore, the collision detection method should handle maximum range of shapes that can be designed. This paper presents a new collision detection method for arbitrarily shaped polyhedra exactly and efficiently. Each polyhedron is restructured hierarchically by convex pieces, called hierarchical convex tree (HCTree). Various pruning methods are used to improve the performance by eliminating collision free convex pieces using the HCTree and they are demonstrated its performance increase by experiments