Real-time and accurate multiple contact detection between general curved objects

Contact detection based on computing minimum distance is a fundamental issue important to many applications. A largely unsolved problem is how to detect multiple contacts that are formed simultaneously between non-convex and non-polyhedral general objects both accurately and in real-time. This paper presents an effective solution to the problem. Our approach first locates the pairs of closest components by fast intersection checking based on hybrid bounding volume hierarchies of surface components. For each pair of such components, it then finds the pairs of closest points and corresponding pairs of closest parametric features by combining collision detection or minimum distance query between polygonal meshes of those components and exact distance computation between the parametric features. Implementation results show that this approach can compute multiple simultaneous contacts between general objects both very accurately and efficiently in the order of several milliseconds regardless of the numbers of features on the objects.