An incremental version of growth distance

A fast algorithm is presented for computing the growth distance between a pair of convex objects in three dimensional space. The growth distance has been introduced by Ong et al. (1996) as a measure of both separation and penetration between objects. This article presents an approach to the growth distance computation using geometrical consideration. Under appropriate conditions, the computational time is very small and does not depend on the total number of faces of the objects. This increase in speed comes from the use of information on the adjacency of faces of the objects. Such adjacency information is particularly useful for object undergoing incremental motion. Computational experiments provided shows that the performance of the algorithm is in the same range as the known fastest Euclidean distance code.