Dinesh Manocha
UNC Chapel Hill
Joint work with Ming C. Lin, Stephen Ehmann, Susan Fisher, Kenny Hoff,  Young Kim and Andrew Zaferakis

“Fast Proximity Queries for Simulating Rigid and Deformable Models”

Many applications of computer simulated environments require spatial or proximity relationships between objects. In particular, dynamic simulation, haptic rendering, surgical simulation, robot motion planning, virtual prototyping, and computer games often require many different proximity queries simultaneously at interactive rates.  These include collision detection, intersection, minimum separation distance, penetration depth, and contact points and normals. It is a major challenge to perform all these queries at interactive rates on complex and deformable models. In this talk, we give a survey of our recent work on fast proximity queries. It includes: 

1. Use of multi-resolution techniques and hierarchical approaches
2. Incremental algorithms for penetration depth estimation between rigid models
3. Generalized proximity queries between rigid and deformable models using graphics hardware
4. Penetration depth estimation between deformable objects using distance fields.
 

We demonstrate their application on rigid-body dynamics simulation and finite-element simulation, as well as medical applications.