Fast Collision Detection for Haptic Displays Using Polygonal Models

Haptic displays provide force feedback for a wide range of applications. During the haptic representation of virtual objects, one of the central tasks is to find out whether the user is inside the defined geometry and the calculation of the point on the surface to which the reaction force is directed. Our paper presents a new fast algorithm for collision detection for point-interaction devices. The design was adopted to the special situation during haptic rendering such as the possibility of exploiting coherence, the fact that high quality models are required, and the lesser number of polygons within the scene. Our hybrid algorithm uses a voxel-map and a polygon-mesh based method for collision detection and works almost independently of the complexity of the scene.