A practical approach to collision detection between general objects

Since collision detection is becoming a bottleneck for real-world applications involving increasingly complex geometries, more efficient ways of detecting collisions are called for. Hierarchies of detail based on spheres seem a powerful approach to overcome this problem. A representation for non-convex objects with curved surfaces is presented, which is independent of the number of features used for the polyhedral model of the object. A new algorithm for collision detection between many moving objects is described. Experiments with two different robots show the efficiency of the method