Issue No. 03 - July-September (1998 vol. 4)
ISSN: 1077-2626
pp: 230-242
ABSTRACT
<p><b>Abstract</b>—This paper presents an event-driven approach that efficiently detects collisions among multiple ballistic spheres moving in the 3D space. Adopting a hierarchical uniform space subdivision scheme, we are able to trace the trajectories of spheres and their time-varying spatial distribution. We identify three types of events to detect the sequence of all collisions during our simulation: collision, entering, and leaving. The first type of events is due to actual collisions, and the other two types occur when spheres move from subspace to subspace in the space. Tracing all such events in the order of their occurring times, we are able to avoid fixed time step simulation. When the size of the largest sphere is bounded by a constant multiple of that of the smallest, it takes <tmath>$O\left( {\bar n_c\ \log\ n+\overline n_e\ \log\ n} \right)$</tmath> time with <it>O</it>(<it>n</it>) space after <it>O</it>(<it>n</it> log <it>n</it>) time preprocessing to simulate <it>n</it> moving spheres, where <tmath>$\overline n_c$</tmath> and <tmath>$\overline n_e$</tmath> are the number of actual collisions and that of entering and leaving events during the simulation, respectively. Since <tmath>$\overline n_e$</tmath> depends on the size of subspaces, we modify the collision model from kinetic theory for molecular gas to determine the subspace sizes for the space subdivision scheme, that minimize simulation time. Experimental results show that collision detection can be done in linear time in <it>n</it> over a large range.</p>
INDEX TERMS
Collision detection, event-driven approach, physical simulation, computer animation, computational geometry.
CITATION
Sung Yong Shin, Dong-Jin Kim, Leonidas J. Guibas, "Fast Collision Detection Among Multiple Moving Spheres", IEEE Transactions on Visualization & Computer Graphics, vol. 4, no. , pp. 230-242, July-September 1998, doi:10.1109/2945.722297