Hardware-accelerated ray-triangle intersection testing for high-performance collision detection

Abstract

We present a novel approach for hardware-accelerated collision detection. This paper describes the design of the hardware architecture for primitive inference testing components implemented on a multi-FPGA Xilinx Virtex-II prototyping system. This paper focuses on the acceleration of ray-triangle intersection operation which is the one of the most important operations in various applications such as collision detection and ray tracing. Also, the proposed hardware architecture is general for intersection operations of other object pairs such as sphere vs. sphere, oriented bounding box (OBB) vs. OBB, cylinder vs. cylinder and so on. The result is a hardware-accelerated ray-triangle intersection engine that is capable of out-performing a 2.8GHz Xeon processor, running a well-known high performance software ray-triangle intersection algorithm, by up to a factor of seventy. In addition, we demonstrate that the proposed approach could prove to be faster than current GPU-based algorithms as well as CPU based algorithms for ray-triangle intersection.