International Conference on Advanced Research in Virtual and Rapid Prototyping SURFACE COLLISION DETECTION WITH THE OVERLAPPING BOUNDING BOX BETWEEN VIRTUAL PROTOTYPE MODELS

This paper identifies requirements and proposes a surface collision detection algorithm for assisting in assembly/disassembly and maintenance verification operations in virtual prototype environments. Virtual prototype models are defined as a collection of surfaces. Available collision detection toolkits for virtual environments are based on polygons. The integration of surface knowledge into the design of the collision detection algorithm, contributes for the development of a better real time collision detection algorithm for supporting assembly and maintenance simulations. The algorithm presented in this paper, takes advantage of the scene graph structure and determines, for each pair of colliding objects, the intersecting surfaces. The virtual prototyping environment uses this knowledge for the automatic recognition of geometric constraints during user interaction in assembly and maintenance operations. This paper also introduces the novel concept of Overlapping Axis-Aligned Bounding Boxes (OAABB) for improving the overall complexity of the collision detection algorithm.