Space-efficient FPGA-accelerated collision detection for virtual prototyping

We present a space-efficient, FPGA-optimized architecture to detect collisions among virtual objects. The design consists of two main modules, one for traversing a hierarchical acceleration data structure, and one for intersecting triangles. This paper focuses on the former. The design is based on a novel algorithm for testing discretely oriented polytopes for overlap in 3D space. In addition, we derive a new overlap test algorithm that can be implemented using fixed-point arithmetic without producing false negatives and with bounded error. SystemC simulation results on different levels of abstraction show that real-time collision detection of complex objects at rates required by force-feedback and physically-based simulations can be obtained. In addition, synthesis results show that the design can still be fitted into a six-million gates FPGA. Furthermore, we compare our FPGA-based design with a fully parallelized ASIC-targeted architecture and a software implementation.