ABSTRACT
Inner sphere trees (ISTs) are suitable for rigid objects and they are the first data structure that is able to compute the penetration volume between a pair of colliding objects at haptic rendering rates. This new contact information guarantees physically-plausible and continuous forces and torques for the collision responses that are essential for stable physically-based simulations and haptic rendering. In order to compute physically plausible collision responses, some kind of contact data is required that must be delivered by the collision detection algorithm. Mainly, there are three different approaches to resolve collisions: the penalty-based method, the constraint-based method and the impulse-based method. In case of rigid objects, the assignment to the grid cells does not have to be computed before each collision check, but it can be done once at the beginning of the simulation as a pre-processing step. The ISTs support different kinds of collision detection queries, including proximity queries and penetration volume computations with one unified algorithm.
