Development of an efficient algorithm for the minimum distance calculation between general polyhedra

일반적인 다면체 사이의 최소거리 계산을 위한 효율적인 알고리즘의 계산

This paper developes an efficient algorithm for the minimum distance calculation between general polyhedra(convex and/or concave). The polyhedron approximates and object using flat polygons which composed of more than three veritices. The algorithm developed in this paper basically computes minimun distance betwen two convex polygons and finds a set of polygons whcih makes a global minimum distance. The advantage of the algorithm is that the global minimum distance can be computed in any cases. But the big disadvantage is that minimum distance computing time is repidly increased with the number of polygons which used to approximate an object. This paper developes a method to eliminate unnecessary sets of polygons, and an efficinet algorithm to compute a minimum distance between two polygons in order to compensate the inherent disadvantage of the algorithm. It takes only a few times iteration to find minimum distance for msot polygons. The correctness of the algortihm are visually tested with a line which connects two points making a global minimum distance of simple convex object(box) and concave object(pipe). The algorithm can find minimum distance between two convex objects made of about 200 polygons respectively less than a second computing time.