A fast and accurate method for detecting the collisions of convex polyhedra
in a graphical simulation environment based on a newly developed method of
distance estimate is presented. By the use of the enclosing and the enclosed
ellipsoids of convex polyhedra, potential collisions can be detected more
accurate than those methods using only bounding volume for object
representation, and more efficient than the polyhedral methods. An approach
for computing the enclosed ellipsoid of a convex polyhedron by compressing,
stretching and scaling operations on its best-fit enclosing ellipsoid is
introduced. Graphical simulations of moving objects in three-dimensional
space and multiple robot arm system applications are conducted to
demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed algorithm for collision detection
and minimum separating distance computation.

¡@