Fast area of contact computation for collision detection of a deformable object using FEM

In case of detection and analysis of deformation in collision scenarios, using a method based on area of contact instead of a point of contact generates numerically stable impulse forces. Area of contact improves the stability of control algorithms, but it is often associated with high computational cost. In this paper, we alleviate this problem by proposing a novel algorithm for collision detection of a deformable mesh against rigid structures. We reuse the data structures maintained for elastic force computations in the FEM, for the purpose of collision detection. Parallel constructs on GPU using reduced model make the simulations interactive even for meshes with thousands of elements. Since we don't maintain any additional complex structure for keeping track of the deformable body at each iteration, we significantly reduce the usage of GPU memory bandwidth. Efficiency of our method is illustrated by reporting high culling efficiency on various tests.