Document Type

Technical Report

Publication Date

2005-07-22

Filename

WUCSE-2005-33.pdf

Technical Report Number

WUCSE-2005-33

Abstract

Collision detection algorithms check the intersection between two given surfaces or volumes. They are computationally-intensive and the capabilities of conventional processors limit their performance. Hardware acceleration of these algorithms can greatly benefit the systems that need collision detection to be performed in real-time. A Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is a great platform to achieve such acceleration. An FPGA is a collection of digital gates which can be reprogrammed at run time, i.e., it can be used as a CPU that reconfigures itself for a given task. In this paper, we present an FPGA based collision detection chip. The chip can be used as a co-processor for a traditional computer or several of them can be utilized to work in parallel to create a very fast collision detection server for real time environments. In our experiments we have seen speeds-up of 36 with respect to a fast Pentium 4 chip. Further improvements are possible by using more advanced collision detection techniques

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Permanent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7936/K7B56H3W

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