Continuous Collision Detection for Wires with Adaptive Resolution

For interactive simulations using a physics engine, a fixed time step is often necessary in order to maintain real-time performance. Furthermore, collisions between the simulated geometric objects have to be detected by solving a computational problem called collision detection. In its discrete formulation, the geometric configurations of the bodies are evaluated at each simulation time step, whereas its continuous variant also considers the bodies’ motion in betweenthe time steps. A fixed simulation time step can lead to missed collisions if only discrete collision detection is performed. This problem arises especially when simulating thin objects such as wires, chains, or ropes for applications like heavy lifting or anchor handling. In order to be able to simulate wires interacting with each other in real-time simulations, continuous collision detection is therefore necessary.An existing simulation model for wires, chains, and ropes using adaptive wire resolution has been augmented using continuous collision detection. This addition has been integrated into the physics engine AGX Dynamics. Issues in existing methods for continuous collision detection of moving line segments caused by co-linearity and co-planarity have been identified, classified and addressed. Using this augmented approach to continuous collision detection allows for alarger fixed simulation step size compared to discrete collision detection, and thus decreases the total run time by up to 58.22% in relevant scenarios