Fast spline collision detection (FSCD) algorithm for solving multiple contacts in real-time

Abstract

Collision detection has been widely studied in the last decades. While plenty of solutions exist, certain simulation scenarios are still challenging when permanent contact and deformable bodies are involved. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach based on volumetric splines that is applicable to complex deformable tubes, such as in the simulation of colonoscopy and other endoscopies. The method relies on modeling radial control points, extracting surface information from a triangle mesh, and storing the volume information around a spline path. Such information is later used to compute the intersection between the object surfaces under the assumption of spatial coherence between neighboring splines. We analyze the method’s performance in terms of both speed and accuracy, comparing it with previous works. Results show that our method solves collisions between complex meshes with over 300k triangles, generating over 1,000 collisions per frame between objects while maintaining an average time of under 1ms without compromising accuracy.