[ODE] Collisions via Minkowski sums

Thomas Harte thomasharte at lycos.co.uk
Thu Mar 27 07:45:02 2003


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The built in collision stuff in ODE isn't really suitable for my purposes, so 
I have been rolling my own. A little reading on the subject from various 
papers across the internet has revealed that forming the Minkowski sum 
of one of my objects and the negation of the other allows me to easily 
(given that my objects are broken into convex quantities) extract, in 
ODE terms, penetration depth and contact normal.

I haven't read anything on faking a contact 'point' as ODE likes to think, 
so at the minute my plan is to calculate the overlap region - which 
intuition tells me will also be convex - and take the centroid of that.

Has anyone on this list any experience in this sort of field? Am I thinking 
along the right lines?

-Thomas

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