Surface Collision Detection for Maintenance Support in Virtual Environments

Abstract

Detecting collision between surfaces is an important feature for supporting interactive assembly operations based on the geometric constraint-based simulation. CAD models define the geometry of components using surfaces as the basic primitive while current collision detection toolkits, disregard this information and use only polygons. The automatic recognition of geometric constraints can use colliding surfaces to simulate realistic behaviour interactively. This paper presents our research into supporting surface based collision detection for use in immersive Virtual Environments. That resulted in the implementation of a surface collision detection module built on top of RAPID.