UNC Collide Research Group Offers New Collision Detection Software

Author: by Matt Barker

UNC Collide Research Group is offering a new C++ collision detection package called SWIFT. SWIFT offers exact and approximate distance computation, and allows for contact determination of three-dimensional polyhedral objects undergoing rigid motion. SWIFT is an API that combines multi-resolution representations with Voronoi-based walking. Offering more speed the Collide Research Groups other collision detection programs, I-COLLIDE and V-CLIP, SWIFT is also more robust than I-COLLIDE. It has been successfully applied to virtual prototyping, dynamic simulation, path planning and other applications. SWIFT can handle geometric models that are closed, convex or composed of convex pieces, and any objects composed of a set of polygons that describe the boundary of a solid in 3 dimensions. It allows for four types of proximity queries, intersection, approximate distance computation, exact distance computation and contact determination. SWIFT is free for non-commercial use.