Computation of a penetration measure between 3D convex polyhedral objects for collision detection

Measures to characterize the penetration between a pair of intersecting obj ects are given, based on translating one object to separate from the other. Algorithms to compute a measure between convex polyhedral objects in R-3 a re presented for two different input representations. These algorithms have linear expected running time. Details of experiments in collision detectio n for 3D objects using the penetration measure are also presented. (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.