A HIGHLY PARALLEL ARCHITECTURE FOR REAL-TIME COLLISION DETECTION IN FLIGHT SIMULATION

This article describes the first implementation of a hardware architecture that solves the problem of collision detection for an arbitrarily complex collection of arbitrarily complex objects in a visual simulation system in real time. Resolving all collisions between N moving objects in real-time requires O(N2) calculations are performed every frame time. One possibility is to have one central processor performing all the calculations. This quickly reaches a performance limit. Alternatively, N processors can each do O(N) calculations, since moving objects only require calculations to be performed relative to themselves. Moreover, only active objects need to do calculations. The hardware architecture described in this article uses this calculation partitioning to solve the collision detection problem. There are a number of collision detection chips per active object, which compare that active object's polygons against all other polygons within the pilot's 360-degrees viewing range. The number of collision detection chips per active object is proportional to the polygon complexity of an object-not the number of objects in the scenario. Further, we describe the model governing the collision detection hardware design and how the hardware is to be incorporated in the visual simulation system.