Hardware-Accelerated Ray Tracing for Discrete and Continuous Collision Detection on GPUs

TL;DR

This paper introduces GPU-accelerated ray tracing algorithms for robot collision detection, significantly improving speed and scalability for complex meshes and large query sets, with detailed accuracy analysis.

Contribution

It is the first to leverage hardware-accelerated ray tracing for direct volume mesh collision detection and applies it to continuous collision detection in robotics.

Findings

Up to 3x faster discrete collision detection compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Up to 9x faster continuous collision detection depending on batch size.

Provides detailed accuracy and tradeoff analysis of collision detection methods.

Abstract

This paper presents a set of simple and intuitive robot collision detection algorithms that show substantial scaling improvements for high geometric complexity and large numbers of collision queries by leveraging hardware-accelerated ray tracing on GPUs. It is the first leveraging hardware-accelerated ray-tracing for direct volume mesh-to-mesh discrete collision detection and applying it to continuous collision detection. We introduce two methods: Ray-Traced Discrete-Pose Collision Detection for exact robot mesh to obstacle mesh collision detection, and Ray-Traced Continuous Collision Detection for robot sphere representation to obstacle mesh swept collision detection, using piecewise-linear or quadratic B-splines. For robot link meshes totaling 24k triangles and obstacle meshes of over 190k triangles, our methods were up to 3 times faster in batched discrete-pose queries than a state-of-the-art GPU-based method using a sphere robot representation. For the same obstacle mesh scene, our sphere-robot continuous collision detection was up to 9 times faster depending on trajectory batch size. We also performed a detailed measurement of the volume coverage accuracy of various sphere/mesh pose/path representations to provide insight into the tradeoffs between speed and accuracy of different robot collision detection methods.