Abstract
Presented in this paper is a general method used to find the distance between two moving objects. This distance is defined as the length of the shortest path from one object to the other. The objects are assumed to be composed of arbitrary quadratic surface segments. The distance problem is formulated as a quadratic programming problem with linear and/or quadratic constraints, which is solved by efficient and robust quadratic programming techniques. Attention is focused on implementation in order to achieve computational efficiency for real-time applications. Computing tests show that the computational speed of this method is of linear order in terms of the total number of bounding surfaces of the two objects. It is also shown that, with a minor modification, this method can be used to calculate the interference between objects. A corresponding general software code has been implemented, and will be used for kinematics and dynamics modelling and simulation of space manipulators including situations with transient topologies, contact of environment, and capture/release of payloads.
An improved FPT algorithm for the flip distance problem
