An accurate collision detection for aerial refueling simulation in virtual reality

Collision detection(CD) is the key technology of aerial refueling simulation system in virtual reality,which can avoid incorrect intersection between the drogue and the probe model. It is a complex task which demands spatial decomposition or bounding volume hierarchy in order to classify the features of the objects for a successful intersection test. Moreover, when the objects are complex and have concavities, holes, etc., the complexity of the decomposition increases and it is necessary to find a method which detects all special cases and degenerations. In this paper, we present a hierarchical sphere-tree collision detection algorithm (HSTCD) for aerial refueling simulation. Result of study shows that HSTCD performs real-time collision detection between drogues and probes, consisting of millions of triangles at interactive rates on a commodity PC.