COLLISION DETECTION

Virtual prototyping technology allows the production §of a virtual prototype from a three-dimensional §drawing developed in a Computer Aided Design system. §This virtual model gives complete information about §the product earlier in the development cycle, §enabling manufacturing companies to produce high §quality products, at low cost and to be marketed §faster. However, current virtual prototyping tools §do not fully support all stages of the product §development cycle, restricting the applicability of §concurrent engineering concepts. There is still a §lack of interactive 3D software tools to address §assembly/disassembly operations and maintenance §verifications. For these operations collision §detection plays an important role. This book §presents the design and implementation of a real §time collision detection algorithm for supporting §interactive assembly and maintenance simulation of §products. Novel concepts and parallel §processing techniques are presented that enabled the §implementation of an efficient collision detection §toolkit. This work should be useful to virtual §prototyping, virtual reality and computer graphics §researchers in general.