Fast contact detection between moving deformable polyhedra

The paper presents an approach to detect and localize contact between deformable polyhedra, which can be convex or concave depending on the time step. Usual contact detection algorithms, defined for convex polyhedra, cannot be used efficiently, as they would imply completing the convex decomposition of the considered polyhedra at each time step, as it can change due to the deformability of these polyhedra. As the computation of this convex decomposition is very expensive (in complexity and computation time), we propose an algorithm to detect and localize the contact in linear time w.r.t. the number of vertices. This algorithm returns the direction of this contact and the value of the maximum intersection distance between the convex hulls of the two considered polyhedra. Experimental results taken from a dynamic simulation application are presented with their computation time, to complete the complexity analysis.